[Bale, Wayward Cosmos – 6]

It was rough getting out of bed that following day… day? That’s a joke. There were no days, no nights, no cases of the “Mondays,” no hump-days, no talk-like-a-pirate-days (unless I did that just randomly) and no Taco Tuesdays. I programmed the computer to track the passing of 24 hour periods-of-time, that’s it. I honestly have no idea how long I had hid under those heavy blankets, covering up and doing my best to escape from my own reality… My guess it had been at least 20 hours or so. I really only got up because of the ins and outs of life; I was starving, and I had to whiz so bad it physically hurt.

Sitting there taking care of the outs, yeah I sat to pee, it was considerably less to clean up when you wait so long to go and your aim is inevitably slightly off center; anyway, sitting there I slowly and deliberately slid my face through my hands rubbing my eyes. Without warning, for some odd reason, a thought flashed through my mind about my old hat.

It was a turn of the century, so therefore purple and gold, Bithlo Minotaur’s baseball hat. It was mainly purple up front with the old-school plasticy gold colored webbing in the back even though it was a one-size-fits-all model. The logo both on front and the smaller version on the right side was the top half of a scruffy looking Minotaur. He also had a baseball hat on, lodged between his two huge horns. He had a bat shifted over his overly muscled right shoulder. I remembered that goofy grin he had, like he was saying “yeah, even us simple country folk in Bithlo know what a Minotaur is.” This was of course in direct contrast with the fact that most people in Bithlo pronounced it with strong enunciations “My-no-tar.”

Toward the back on the left side there was a permanent marinara sauce stain from this amazing deep dish pizza I got back in ’12 after I got that promotion to Senior Software Engineer. For years after people would refer to it as my “Fighting Mino Cap” because it looked like a blood stain… Why did I even remember that?

Man I loved that hat. I loved baseball. I loved the Minotaurs, even though they sucked for over 80 years…

I missed that stupid hat, I missed baseball, I missed the Minotaurs, I missed aimlessly meandering on cracked sidewalks in frayed jeans that were too long which inevitably scraped the concrete as I walked, I missed fiddling with little pebbles picked up off the ground and real dirt on my hands, I missed green trees and sitting in the shade after a long run in the park, I missed having a chill breeze hit my sweaty face autonomically triggering deep relaxing breaths, I missed the wet Florida heat on a bright blue summer afternoon, I missed the daily short bursts of ‘sun rain’ that happened to fall on those bright days, I missed my beat up blue ’06 car and driving out to my job at Kennedy Space Center, and I missed her.

Then the feeling hit me like a solid kick to the stomach; it felt as though I instantly had the wind knocked out of me… I hated that feeling with every quantum particle in my being, something I actively avoided by doing anything I could on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis… trying to continually distract myself… hoping it would never come – but inevitably it did – like clockwork – now about every few months – in the beginning it used to be more often but less powerful – at this point when it hit, albeit less frequent, it almost always dropped me to my knees, as it did this day, in a fit of uncontrollable loud sobbing… I yelled nonsense at nobody and pounded on the metal floor plates until the heels of my hands bled… in complete misery… it typically stopped only when I’d pass out from the exhaustion…

It’s called “saudade” pronounced sau·da·de. By pure definition, as found in my nearly infinite data banks of information; is a Portuguese word that describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return.

That’s why on my really bad days I stood in nothing but my bedclothes by the primary airlock bulkhead staring out into deep space with my hand hovering over the big blue button.

I had scratched the word “freedom” on this plastic button for a multitude of personal reasons.

[738] Words : Carbon