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The first thing I see when I opened my eyes doesn’t make sense. It’s too uncanny to be a dream and I feel disturbingly aware in this moment. No, I didn’t open my eyes, I wasn’t seeing through my eyes I could feel the layers and abstraction, the granularity and a precise, uniform focus across my whole field of vision, there was no fovea centralis in the mix here. A camera then. Oh. That makes the scene make a little more sense I(?) suppose. Fear should be shooting through me like lightning through dried timber precipitates the rebirth of a forest and the end of so much life. Not done yet, but inevitable. However, I feel only the overwhelming heat build in my body/mind’s map of my chest and pelvis. This can’t be real. My attention was splintered; the force of the realization and the overwhelming nature of perfect, uniform focus on the whole image which defines my perception was incomparable in its magnitude. Though, processing the scene in front of me, I can infer an experience that was more staggering. But I did not remember it. But I could see it. The cold steel of the ship I know as home — that I didn’t know until now I couldn’t be leaving, not wholly — frames this cacophony of information and interpretation. By my deep familiarity I could anticipate the scrapes that many dragged chairs, dropped tools, dragged metal feet, and sheer time has visited upon the floor, walls, lip of my bunk, and built in locker. But I could not see them; as overwhelming as the total perspective gave me, I could not focus on one point as specifically as I could have before. The rest of the scene took just as much of my attention; the cluttered desk, full of our hard won mementos reminding us of of what we valued; the posters, worn from too many adjustments, that I can’t read the text on but know by heart; the unmade bed with all the soft comforts we fall asleep with every night; a card I wrote you, for our second most recent anniversary (I don’t blame you, that one was better) riveted into the wall; my tattered boots; your strong hydraulic biceps, steady, but under load. The long knife. With the same, frustrating, equal attention, I see my b…. No… her body. Moments ago released from the tension holding it up, she now fulcrums forward on her knees and follows the arc dictated by oh so familiar gravity. The last fibres of the skin not yet pulled back to slack since separation. Her head, of course, was free of no such bond; held tightly by an intimately familiar scrunched hand holding loose, curly hair. It will take a lot longer to understand how, scientifically, I feel the arousal currently rolling through me as I stare as my girlfriend, you, start to bring my former head to level with her gaze faster than the body can fall. A pace which I appreciate as I reel for answers. I watch, rapt as I can be, as you lock the still pliant lips, which I felt so inextricable from, into a passionate kiss. A ghost of a smile and a nearly unresolvable twitch passes that emptying face. I have no memory of that sensation. I will have no memory of that sensation. Though I know it’s now been less than three seconds, I know she dies as different person than I am now. Your soft synthetic tongue pushes through the kiss and probes the newly formed exit of her throat. An eternity passes as I drink in the rest of the fall, the kiss. The final moments. The vacant thump to the floor and the goodbye kiss. Why am I here. Wasn’t that the end? You wink at me. You can hear me. A shiver passes through some aspect of the unadapted sensation which makes up my being. Your eyes lock on to my perception. I hear, for the first time, as you address the rest of myour lives. “Don’t worry,” you intoned, “I’ll treat you just as well as her.”