Mirror in the Aether

II

I'm soaked and rattled with a stiff neck and a full bladder. I feel terrible. Another non-sleep to leave me groggy, aching, and confused. If not slightly repulsed at the usual collage of ego and lust and shame. The repugnance of feeling both aroused and perplexed, then with my mother showing up for no reason in particular. Colliding worlds of reality and wish fulfillment seen through a tapestry of history books, architectural lectures, and some vague memories of a voluptuous movie star's sultry boredom.

The sheets are moist and cold as I peel them off, creak my body upright, swing my stiff and swollen legs over the side of the sleeping plank, and gingerly slip my toes into my night boots.  The weight of my lumbering tread owing to my throbbing headrush as I approach the relief bay to observe another hot and dark - almost red - streak of steaming daily necessity with disgust.

Almost every "night" I'm subject to the perverted highlight reel of the "day's" activities. I know I have to keep my mind on things. Comfort through routine. Comfort through routine. But each night everything I have consumed through the day is regorged as a taunting shame fantasy or a relentless night terror or simply a visceral reminder that I'm stuck in this metal box. It could almost be amusing if I didn't feel so crooked. A choice between these tortured trips or the vast but singular wealth of nightmare inspired by the burning emptiness of deep space. I'm surrounded by it. Daily. Nightly. Constantly. I've been out here...I don't even know how long. A tiny cell in space. An innovative and noble punitive/reformative measure for serious offenders. Stuck in a can with a bed and some books, rocketing onwards. On and on and on and hopefully not before long into a massive star that envelopes the very memory of my existence.

I feel old. And tired. I might be learning things and I might now know some things, but this is truly tedious. I feel that I can assert that now because I've been here long enough. So long that I don't even know how long. So long.

I'll sit back down on the sleeping plank and regard the low light of the deck. A blue hum. Each day I get up, or rather, each time, and I'll look at the great shutter opposite the plank. A series of mighty horizontal panels deftly contained within a cold functional arch of indifference. A passive shield from the black void and its gases and rocks and perpetual fire. Pure unfeeling hell. And it's just outside. 

I don't see myself as lost out here. I'm on a linear trajectory, thrusting forth into the void with a singular purpose which is to never stop. Punitive and reformative. I'm a found soul who is made and fulfilled and tormented and then unmade over and over in a cycle of constant futility. A living myth of the future borne from Ancient Greece, made by the Gods from the figures of Prometheus and Sisyphus and Tantalus but without the significance or legacy. No-one even knows of me anymore. And by this point, the distance I've covered is so great that my past may very well have been swallowed entirely.