Visitor

• 1 •

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.

Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.

I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience. Just like in the army, where life in the trenches worked the same way. It was the quiet that jangled the nerves. It was the lead-up before the push more than the push itself. To this day, I grow more faint at the scent of gun oil than I do at the sight of blood.

Maybe this is why it feels like a waking nightmare, living the galactic dream. I’ve got it all. I’ve got my own place,[1] a steady girlfriend,[2] a loving pet,[3] a decent-paying job,[4] a reliable car,[5] peace and privacy,[6] and the best view of the galactic core that doesn’t require a lead vest.[7]

Yup, I’m truly living the dream.

So why do I feel like someone is about to pinch me?

Merchants and pirates pass through my sector now and then and leave behind trade goods and news of the war. Everything’s changing. The items I now barter for betray the fact that I’m in a relationship with the girl next door. I score flowers, a wedge of cheese, and two small blocks of chocolate from a gentleman I’ll call a “merchant” if he’ll promise not to laugh. I also learn from him of the first battle in sector eight, a small skirmish a couple light years along this arm of the Milky Way. I can imagine how it went down, having been in more than a few dogfights myself. A Ryph scout cruiser meets an exploratory force that has broken off from the main fleet. Shots are fired. One of the small navy ships goes down. Just another casualty of a war that’s taken billions on either side.

But then some cleric in the navy’s offices back at Sol logs the coordinates and notifies the kid’s parents of the last known location of their son’s or daughter’s atoms. And that cleric or that parent or some intrepid reporter notices that technically, the ship was just over some arbitrary line and that technically, the war has now moved into sector eight, and that technically, this means the galaxy proper is now well and truly fucked.

Talking heads blather across the holosphere. Young men and women gather outside recruiting centers, chests thrust out, to sign their noble death certificates. Thirty-two settled and semi-settled worlds across sector eight tremble. Sectors two and three start voting out doves and voting in hawks. Everyone on Earth wonders when sector one will get their turn. All the other sectors wonder the same goddamn thing.

Meanwhile, the Ryph advance. Meanwhile, war gets closer. There’s no stopping it.

These are my pleasant and cheery thoughts as I drive chocolate and flowers over to the neighboring beacon for a date. It’s Sunday out on the edge of sector eight. A day of rest. But I don’t know how anyone can.