The weight of this teacup… it’s the first thing that truly baffled me when I returned. Such a solid, demanding presence in my hand. Out there, it would have been a ghost, a puff of porcelain and warm liquid, tethered to a wall. Here, it has authority. It insists on its own reality. I’ve been back for thirty years, and I still haven’t gotten used to the sheer, stubborn weight of things.
They called us pioneers. Heroes. I’ve seen the footage a thousand times, a younger man with my face waving from a motorcade, confetti snowing down on us. They asked what it was like, and I gave them the words they wanted. ‘Magnificent.’ ‘Awe-inspiring.’ ‘A testament to human ingenuity.’ I spoke of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, a fragile bauble of blue and white, and they nodded, satisfied. But I never told them the truth. I couldn’t.
The truth isn’t magnificent. It’s terrifying. It isn’t about the beauty of the Earth; it’s about the crushing, absolute emptiness that cradles it. We were a speck of dust in an infinite cathedral of silence. You float in that ink-black symphony of the void, and you hear it—not with your ears, but with your soul. The Great Silence. And it tells you a secret: nothing down there matters.
I tried. I swear, I tried to care again. I’d watch the news—wars, elections, stock market fluctuations—and it felt like watching ants scurry on a distant hill. Their frantic energy, their triumphs and tragedies… all of it swallowed by that profound, unending quiet I had lived in for a few precious days. They were shouting in a vacuum, and I was the only one who knew no sound could escape.
My confession isn’t that I went to the moon. It’s that I never truly came back. A part of me is still up there, in the cold, clean dark between worlds, watching this little world spin. I am a ghost haunting my own life, performing the motions of a man who is supposed to be here. I hold this teacup, feel its weight, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel my own again.