I love You

A Story by Valor Gosch

A story about a Woman who wakes up after a hundred years to find everyone she ever known dead.

Jennifer woke up in a cold dark illuminated room that posed only a small computer with the logo of the UN imprinted upon it. The trip she had just experienced seemed only like a day ago, but in reality, she had been voyaging the cosmos for almost a hundred years. The small computer possessed recordings and messages from her children and husband. She looked at her laptop in fear. What was in it? What was the future of her children? Had her husband left her for another woman? Jennifer just stared blankly at the laptop. She did not wish to learn the fate of the people she loved. She already knew their fates but how they got to them is what scared her the most. She wanted to know of her sweet little boy she once cared for with all her affection that she once nursed. She finally gained enough courage to open the laptop. The friendly logo of the UN popped up. The LCD screen lit up the room and made it seem as there was a shining sun in front of her. A line of messages annoyed Jennifer. To find out that most of it was from workers and dead rocketry commissioners, It was annoying to see such things pop up on her private emails but she was sure that they had to be of some importance. luckily she found a button to sort it into family messages only. The first one she clicked on was from her six year old son. The video played with a tiny boy with beautiful blue eyes and golden locks of hair. He had only two pairs of front teeth that were crooked. The tiny boy began to speak.

“Hi mommy I hope you're all right in your big rocket. I love you very much and I hope you have fun when you get to Hercules.” The message was short but cute. She wanted to see her baby boy all grown up. She wanted to see his other stages of life. She continued onwards through the messages. There was around fifty of them, most of them chronicled her boy growing up. It almost became an annoyance seeing her sweet boy grow up. He seemed to be stubborn and snobbish at times. Then she realized that the fame of her journey to this planet must have propelled him to superstardom. There was one thing that annoyed her: she did not wish for her boy to become someone who had an ego. She remembered her at being different at school. She remembered the girls tearing her Isaac Asimov books to pieces. Jennifer was ridiculed for being different from her peers. She wanted her child to be like her, not like the bullies that almost ended her dream of going to space. The last entry from her son was frightening to open. She did not wish to see her son as an old man coughing and wheezing from whatever disease he had gained through his age. She opened the video. In it had her boy withered with age, and a little girl who had the long golden locks of hair that her son once possessed.

“Hi mom heres my little girl she’s 7 and she says she wants to be an astronaut just like you. Tell her your name honey.” The little girl stumbled on her words trying to make a sentence.

“Hi grandma my names Kennedy Jenniferfrr...Jennifer.” The tiny girl smiled and waved at the camera she began to show her toys. Most of them were space toys with the logo of UN embossed upon them. The girl came up with stories of space flight and her fighting aliens. The videos ended there from her son. The little girls name was peculiar. Why Kennedy Jennifer? Maybe she was named after the Kennedy launch center which was the most likely answer, since she had launched from there. She went on to her husbands videos. He only left one. It was dated the day after her launch. It began with a man that had tears running down his face, and after a few minutes of hesitation, he began to speak.

“Hi there honey. I wish I could be up there with you but i'm not. I wish you hadn't signed up for the program but you did. Now I'm just a lonely man on a tiny blue planet. You are living up to your dream of space travel. I love you. I love you more than I value my own sanity but now the angel that fell from the heavens must return.” His words seemed like something out of a cheesy teen fiction movie. But then she realized that the last line he spoke made Jennifer feel an extreme sense of ambivalence. The line he spoke was referencing their first date and how awkward he always seemed to be reading off a manuscript of cheesy pick up lines and that was one of them. Jennifer fell down sobbing. She had no idea that space travel would be this bad. When she began the astronaut training one of the most feared tests was the isolationism mentoring. She had spent 365 days in a tiny chamber that had no form of entertainment. she had excelled past all of her colleagues. But this sadness was not something made from isolation but of loss. She had just woken up like the princess Aurora and found everyone she ever loved dead. She didn't want to live. She didn't want to see the world that they were visiting. She just wanted to fall down on the ground and die. She cried for what seemed like hours but in actuality was 30 minutes. She pulled herself up from the ground and stood looking at the laptop for almost an entire minute.

She sat down and clicked on the last name. It was the little girl that she had only seen in videos, Jennifer Kennedy. There was around 20 videos of that she sent. She was a fine girl, she had an insatiable love for science. It showed in the videos. She wore glasses and she had golden hair that shined and reflected the sunlight off of it. The girl talked of Sci-fiction and math as if it were her child. She flaunted her first editions of I Robot and 2001 a Space Odyssey with pride. She seemed like a doppelganger of sorts and possessed a smile that was unforgettable. The videos started getting darker around the time she was 25. she talked about lovers dying in great fires and her fathers death. She seemed to have lost her willingness to live until her second to last video. She entered the astronaut training program at age 27. Her dreams were coming true at last. The last video had the picture of the girl that Jennifer had come to love. She was sitting in an uncomfortable position that she too had experienced in her life. Her asymmetrical face turned to the camera. She smiled and waved.

“Hi Grandma I'm coming to visit you. I have nothing on this planet for me now but at least I will have you. I don't know you all i've ever know of you is videos of your famous launch and books that i've read on your childhood. But when I reach you we will be happy. God I hope we will be happy. We have to be happy.”

The camera shut off with the last image being of a saddened looking girl. Jennifer felt a sense of guilt that this young girl had to go on through life all alone, but not only guilty for her, but everyone she left behind on the planet. She did everything in her own interest and she hadn't even realized it. She looked up the arrival of her child and it was only a year away.

“I have to make it right.” she whispered to herself. She did not believe that bringing closure to only one of her relatives would solve everything but she had to try.

After one year:

The life on the planet had been hard. The lifeforms were extremely dangerous and there were no signs of intelligent life. The crew was around a thousand people, and they had lost around 2 out of the group.

The day the ship arrived, it showed an impressive light show. Hundreds of capsules lighting up the sky. The first capsules landed, inside them weak looking figures that had not fared well through the atmospheric re-entry process. For three hours everyone searched each and every pod. The Crew lined in single file lines that stretched on for almost a mile. They were being tested for disease and weakness that might have developed in a half a G environment. The line took a few hours for it to be sorted out. But once it was, Jennifer went looking for her grandchild. She hollered her name in crowds of people looking for her. She looked and she looked until she found a golden lining of hair in the darkness. Jennifer ran to the light with the utmost urgency. As she kindly slid across people to find a young beautiful golden haired girl in a dark grimey jumpsuit, she seemed to shine through the darkness. She seemed to emit a light of hope. Jennifer ran to the child that she had only seen in videos and grasped her so tight that it almost seemed as if she was attacking the girl. The girl spoke shyly--

“Uh hi.”

Jennifer did not say anything for a full minute. but once she began to talk it was a slurry of questions and then a sudden stop in speech for about 30 seconds.

Then she grabbed Kennedy and brought her into a stance that put them in line with each other’s eyes.

”I will never leave you like I did to everyone else.” The sudden change in attitude scared Kennedy. Her grandmother seemed to be in a depression that was caused by her leaving so many people on earth. She still held Kennedy in her grasp.

All the fragile looking girl said was “I love you.”

She stood there looking at the girl. Kennedy continued to speak “They all still loved you; they all understood why you wanted to go; they don't hate you for it.”

Jennifer was speechless. How could this girl have planned such words that struck her with a conclusion to her incomplete life on the planet she used to call home.

“I wish I had said goodbye”.

The people Jennifer once loved were now dead but in her memories they were very much alive.

Jennifer realized the future was not all that certain but whatever it held Jennifer had something to live for. She looked at the girl again, her blue eyes seemed to resonate as brightly as her hair did.

Kennedy began to speak:

“I have you now that’s all that matters.”

Jennifer felt a sense of misery and shame that she left behind so many people she loved, but what she did was not selfless but definitely was not selfish.

But whatever Jennifer did in the past did not matter anymore. She had to do this. She had to make things right for this girl.

“Uh, hey, do you want to see an alien bird.” Jennifer looked at Kennedy with soulful thoughts.

She thought, ‘the world has wronged this girl so much it has destroyed any sign of hope and yet she still found it.’

Jennifer wished she had this trait but she didn't.

Jennifer thought of a story her mom used to read to her. It was about a boy who followed a bird and left his family without knowing it. A quote that stuck out still remained, “You left to find more about me; you went through the darkest nights and the coldest weathers to follow me, but was it worth it?.”

Jennifer just stared at the alien birds. Then she turned her head to see Kennedy staring at the birds with a child's awe. The darkened jumpsuit that she wore seemed to be a metaphor of her life; her hair gleamed through the darkness. For once in the past year the world finally looked up. No matter what happens she knew that she would have this girl to look up to.

Kennedy spoke.

“You know they wrote a poem about your ship and the crew.”

Jennifer spoke In an interested voice.

“Really? How does it go?”

Kennedy prepped herself.

“Remember the story, remember their names, they will outlive us and we will die. This seems to be our curse when it is really theirs. They will not see their family, they will not see their lovers. They carry this burden for us, let us thank them for their dedication to us.”

The poem echoed and burned its image into Jennifer's mind. She could think of rows of children in classrooms saluting a flag that held the Logo of the UN.

“Well thats behind us now, there’s nothing we can do about the people that we left behind. All we can do is care for the ones we have now.” Jennifer brought Kennedy closer and hugged her once more.

We can not always take back our actions, but we can always try our best to mend the consequences of them. The black grimness had washed away from Kennedy’s jumpsuit. Jennifer hoped the same would happen to the past, but she knew it would not.