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“Ta Da!” I announce, after I manipulate the last piece of the xenonite puzzle box Rocky has made me, revealing my prizes: a pawn and a rook.
Rocky does jazz hands so I return the gesture, holding one piece in each hand and make a little whooping sound in celebration.
“That was a fun one!” I say, as I make my way over to the side table in the lab, where the quarter full chess board is waiting for its newest members to join. I delicately position the pieces where they go, one in the upper corner on the silver colored side and one added to its row on the gold. They are different alloys that Rocky can very easily differentiate between sonically and also look visually distinct enough for me. Although it’s fun and a little luxurious to imagine them as entirely crafted from precious metals.
“Grace complete in sixteen minutes and forty seven seconds!” he says. “Obviously too easy. Will make next one more difficult.”
I roll my eyes but I can’t help but smile. Rocky doesn’t like when I call this environmental enrichment, even though that’s absolutely what it is. He says it makes him feel like a zookeeper. And I think he basically is and also I might as well get used to that. But I have acquiesced to calling this “puzzle time” in his presence.
Although I’m secretly waiting for the day when he runs out of ideas and just starts tossing a ball around for me to play fetch with. Eh, if it comes to that, I’m not gonna say no.
So ‘puzzle time’ is the latest in what I assume is Rocky’s three hundred something part plan in making sure I don’t go completely insane over the next few years. I think at this point he must have done as much research on the topic as actual human psychologists. He’s always creating routines and fun games and tries to keep me happy and positive, and makes me talk about my feelings and harasses me until I do what he says.
It’s so annoying. I love him more than anything in the entire universe.
And I like my new chess set, slowly building by two new pieces every week or so until we can play together. And the feeling of accomplishment I get when unlocking a puzzle box and getting new pieces. I imagine there’s something in his secret little notepad about giving me things to look forward to and some kind of reward system. There are days when things like this feel depressing, and I feel overmanaged and irritable about it. When I tell him to leave me alone and I sit in the screen room and think about how I’m never going to see the sky again. But not that often, at least not as often as it could be.
Today is one of my good days.
“I need to sleep now,” Rocky says, interrupting my little reverie. “You will watch, question?”
“Always, bud,” I reply. The answer is yes every time he asks, but I think he likes the reassurance of me telling him, even if he knows it’s true. I’m familiar with the feeling.
“Grace have something to work on, question? Possibly sleep longer than average this cycle.”
I let the minor irritation at the mother henning dissipate with a couple of easy breaths. I’m not going to throw myself out of the airlock if I’m idle for a few hours. Not that I’ll say that, because Rocky very, very, very much dislikes me making jokes like that.
“Hmmm, I’m not sure, Rock,” I say, even though that’s not quite true. “Maybe I’ll clean.”
“Doubt,” he says.
I laugh. “A book then. Some quiet reading time.”
He pauses on his way to his sleeping area. “Not our book! No reading ahead!”
“I wouldn’t dare,” I assure him. In another regularly scheduled bullet point on the ‘don’t let Grace go crazy’ routine, I read a chapter or two out loud from The Lord of the Rings series. Next up tonight before I go to bed is ‘The Road to Isengard’. He likes it when I do silly voices or accents for the characters. I like making him laugh. “Don’t worry, Rock,” I say. “You sleep, I’ll watch, okay?”
He either accepts this or is too tired to argue further, because he’s curled up and out like a light a few seconds later.
I like just sitting crosslegged on the floor and observing for the first few minutes of his sleep cycle. There’s something meditative about it as I sit and breathe and watch him completely still. The nauseating fear that came with seeing him motionless and comatose after exposing himself to my atmosphere is always dimly present in the back of my mind, but as time goes on it gets smaller and quieter. It’s much easier to replace the image and the feeling now, in happier times. I know he’s healthy now, and we’re safe, we’re going home, and he’s going to wake up. Some days it’s harder to remember that than others, but today is one of the easy days.
I put the laptop to the side and get up. I might read something later, or work on a paper, or heck maybe even actually clean, depending on how long he’s out. But that’s not what I’ll do first. I have my own little routine that Rocky doesn’t know about. He can’t be the only person around here responsible for keeping me sane.
And so it’s time to add a few new lines to the wall.
The whiteboards don’t have enough space, so when I ran out on those, I switched to the bedroom wall and copied over. I have markers in several colors, and my new found paints, and whenever Rocky sleeps, I add something new.
The first thing I wrote here was the swoopy Eridian symbol for fate that he drew on my arm when we first played with the henna. I didn’t want to forget it when it faded from my skin, so I painted it out in petrova line red, which felt appropriate.
And then I added my name in Eridian, then his, and copied out Grace Rocky save stars after I asked him to show me how it’s written.
After that it was partly an Eridian written language practice exercise and partly a mural. I started writing anything I wanted to remember, like the Eridian word for precious. I might have written that one a few different times, including a Grace is precious precious precious which still makes me teary eyed.
Then love and home and Earth and Erid.
Everytime I could I added a little bit more to it. I drew in a little cartoony Eridian and a stick figure human. I added Grace love Rocky and Rocky love Grace. I drew the Hail Mary and the Blip A. I copied over the math I did to turn around for him. I thought about things we said to each other, and what I wanted to remember. Eridians have perfect memory, but my human brain with a few amnesia holes still left in it can’t be trusted, I worried, and best add them here.
So I put down some favorite quotes, in Eridian if I know the words, in English if I don’t. I write Grace say Grace will die. Rocky fix. I write You’re not alone anymore, buddy. Neither of us are. I write you are very brave.
And at the side, I keep a list.
A list of all the things Rocky does for me, and all the reasons I love him. All the ways he keeps me sane, and why he’s my best friend. All his best qualities, and the things we’ve accomplished together.
So today I add “Rocky is making me a chess set so we can play together.” And I add on the next line “He makes me puzzle boxes as a gift along with the pieces”. It’s already a very long list, and it gets longer all the time.
My list isn’t just there in case I somehow forget it happened, though. It’s there in case I forget to be grateful for it.
I don’t really know if I was a good man, back on Earth. I have enough memories of my life that I can at least say with a certainty that I wanted to be. And I tried to be. And I wasn’t always successful. I know I’m smart. And I’m funny. And I could have been a good friend then, if I’d tried harder, but at least I'm a good friend now.
I can’t pretend I’m not afraid. Reflecting on my time on Earth, I’m ashamed to say that cowardice was one of my defining traits. Ryland Grace, the teacher. Ryland Grace, the scientist. Ryland Grace the selfish, the frightened, the failure.
Ryland Grace, the lonely.
Not anymore.
I’m a new man now, and I’d like to stay a better one.
But it’s scary, out in space. Anything could still go wrong. Rocky or I could develop some illness, I could suffer from malnutrition sooner than I thought. The ship could break down, the mission could still fail, Sol and Eridani could keep dimming until both our species went extinct. I could get to Erid and they can’t keep me alive. Or they could and they choose not to. Or they do and I live in a sad, dark little zoo for the rest of my sad little life.
That’s a lot of ifs and a lot of coulds and a lot of potential paths to depression and insanity.
So this is when I have to choose to live in the moment. And take these quiet, sleeping Rocky hours to dwell on what I do know.
I read my list out aloud, all the way through. I repeat some of the other words on the wall, and tell myself I’m brave. And precious. And I can rely wholeheartedly that Rocky can fix.
Maybe one day I’ll tell him this is here. He can’t read it on his own, whatever the layer of paint or ink on the wall may be, it’s far too thin for him to detect. I could have him point the scanner directly at the walls, and read everything I’ve written, about him, and me, and us. And I’ll tell him how he keeps me sane, and I love him, and even if I get sad about my life sometimes and what it’s going to be missing, that I don’t regret it. I’ll never regret it, and I would look back every time and turn around and chase after him.
But then again, maybe I won’t ever tell him. Maybe it’ll always just be for me, my little secret. The game I play to help me not be so afraid. What I can do to stop worrying about what will be or might be or should be.
Because I don’t need to worry about any of that here. When I look at my wall, and read off each word, I know exactly what is.
I’m loved.