XX. Farewell For Now.

“Farewell for now” calls my little martian from across the room.

He has taken to talking formally with me again, our time together runs thin and he no longer blankets me with the comfort of short-lived camaraderie.

It is not that he doesn’t care, he insists, it is because he does. I don’t blame him but I am sad to see him go.

He knows I can be quite theatrical so he has scrawled out a little note for me. He presses it into my palm as his ever-busy hands dart out to look for his little carry-all.

He has on an over-sized purple wind sheeter, because “Whatever they tell you, there’s always a bloody breeze in space!” And brown gumboots that come up till his knees; “for all that goddamn sludge on Venus,” he reminds me.My grumpy little martian is quite the seasoned space traveller.

I don’t feel that terrible as I watch him waddle out of my bedroom, this doesn’t feel like a goodbye forever. This feels more like a, “I’ll see you in 20”.

The only uncertainty lies in the fact that I cannot ascertain whether it will be 20 minutes or 20 years.

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Later that day, I sit at my desk and open the messily folded note. Upon it, scrawled in a black ball pen I read my little Martians words:

“To my primary reader, the keeper of my words,

You know who you are.

And to all the other little Martians near and far,

I call on you for a minute or two.

To close your eyes

Cease your sighs

And imagine.

Imagine a world, a time, a place, a day.

Where the sun rises and sets ,but sometimes goes away

Where mornings come afresh, a complete factorial reset

And yet

Each night is a fight against the villainous might

Of gratification and honour, of comedy and horror.

Now Imagine a dimension, where love exists,

imagine a pretension, where non-agenda’d interactions persist.

Where boy meets girl, but they do not kiss.

It seems far too fantastical, all of this.

One is a delusion, wrapped in mirrors and illusion.

The other is a firm reality, taped with confusion.

Which is which, I’ll leave that to you to decipher.

And off I go, a couple words lighter. “

I smile as I fold the note back up. It is so like the Martian and yet so unnervingly like myself.

I look up at the smoggy, barely-there stars still visible in the purple night and I wave at him, wherever he is now, in his wind sheeter and little gum boots.

It is not a hello or a goodbye

It is a reassuring ‘I see you and I know you see me too.’