Lag

Sasha → Eli. Day 1. Delay: 4 seconds.

Made it. The ship’s called the Meridian, which sounds noble until you see the bunks. I’m sharing a cabin with a geologist named Tariq who snores like a combustion engine. The launch was smoother than I expected. I thought I’d cry and I didn’t, which probably means I’ll cry later, at the worst possible time.

The window in the common room faces backward. I can still see home. It looks like a marble.

I love you. Feed the cat.

Eli → Sasha. Day 1. Delay: 4 seconds.

Cat’s been fed. Cat does not care that you’re gone. Cat is a sociopath wrapped in fur.

I watched the launch from the roof. The contrail hung there for almost twenty minutes. Mrs. Dao from downstairs came up and brought tea and didn’t say anything, which was exactly right.

The marble’s still here. Come back anytime.

Sasha → Eli. Day 5. Delay: 1 minute, 12 seconds.

The stars don’t twinkle out here. I didn’t know that was an atmosphere thing. Without it they’re just fixed points, like someone pinned them there. Steadier than I expected. Harder. I think I prefer them this way.

Tariq is already sick of the food. I told him to enjoy the freeze-dried rations while they last, once we switch to hydroponic in month three, he’ll miss them.

How’s the restaurant? Did Marco figure out the oven?

Eli → Sasha. Day 6. Delay: 1 minute, 20 seconds.

Marco did not figure out the oven. Marco has somehow made the oven worse. I think he’s in a feud with it and the oven is winning.

Stars that don’t twinkle sounds wrong. Like a sky with no weather. I like that the stars here still twinkle. It means there’s something between us and them.

I made your soup last night. The one with the lentils. It wasn’t the same. I think you put something in it that you never told me about.

Sasha → Eli. Day 14. Delay: 3 minutes, 40 seconds.

It’s cumin. Toasted. You toast the seeds in the dry pan first until they smell like warm dust. I should have told you before I left. I’m sorry. There are a lot of things like that: small things I didn’t think to say because I assumed I’d always be there to just do them myself.

We passed the relay station yesterday. The delay will start growing faster now. You’ll see it in the timestamps. I’ll keep writing at the same pace, but the gap between us will start showing up in the numbers.

I’m telling you now so it doesn’t sneak up on you.

Eli → Sasha. Day 15. Delay: 3 minutes, 55 seconds.

It was the cumin. I knew it was something. Tonight I’m toasting every seed in the kitchen until I get it right.

I know about the delay. I read the mission packet. All 200 pages, which I think makes me the only spouse in history to actually read the mission packet. There was a chart on page 74 that showed the signal delay over time. It goes up like a ramp that doesn’t level off. I tore that page out.

I don’t know why I’m telling you that. Yes I do.

Sasha → Eli. Day 30. Delay: 9 minutes, 15 seconds.

I’ve been teaching a botany class for the crew. Most of them are engineers and they look at soil samples the way you look at jazz: polite confusion. But one of them, a woman named Priya, asked me today why roots grow down. And I said gravity, and she said there’s no gravity here, and I had to sit with that for a second because she was right. We’re growing the seedlings in centrifuge bays and the roots don’t know which way down is. They reach in every direction, looking for something to hold onto.

I cried in front of the whole class. Priya handed me a napkin and nobody said anything.

Eli → Sasha. Day 33. Delay: 9 minutes, 42 seconds.

You asked about Marco and the oven three weeks ago. He quit. The oven won. We hired a woman named June who treats the kitchen like an operating room and honestly it’s an improvement.

I made the soup again. Toasted the cumin. It’s closer. Still not yours.

Sasha → Eli. Day 52. Delay: 22 minutes, 6 seconds.

The air recycler in my cabin makes a clicking sound between 0200 and 0400. Every night. Tariq sleeps through it. I’ve filed three maintenance requests and nothing.

We hit the halfway marker today. The captain made a toast and someone played guitar and I danced with Tariq, who is a worse dancer than you, which I didn’t think was possible. You are a terrible dancer. I love you. Those are related facts.

The sun is still visible from the observation deck but it’s smaller now. The size of a bright coin held at arm’s length. The hydroponics don’t seem to notice, they’re under grow-lights anyway, but the seedlings I put near the observation windows are leaning hard toward it. They don’t know it can’t feed them anymore.

Eli → Sasha. Day 56. Delay: 23 minutes, 50 seconds.

You told me about the dance four days ago. I keep thinking about the guitar. Someone brought a guitar on a generation ship. That’s the best decision anyone on this crew has made.

I’m sitting in the kitchen. It’s 2 AM. The cat is on the counter, which I’ve given up fighting. I’m drinking the Tempranillo from that place on Ninth, the cheap one we used to drink on the fire escape, and I’m looking at your chair and I want you to know I don’t sit in it. I sit in mine. Yours is still yours.

I know you can’t come back for it. I’m keeping it anyway.

Sasha → Eli. Day 78. Delay: 1 hour, 14 minutes.

I haven’t written in fourteen days. The delay’s past an hour and I keep starting messages and closing the screen.

I miss talking to you. Not messages. Talking. How fast it was. I’d say something and you’d already be there. No gap. I started a list of what I miss and stopped at forty.

Eli → Sasha. Day 84. Delay: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

I keep looking at the kitchen window. There’s a smudge on the glass from where you’d lean your head waiting for the kettle. I keep meaning to clean it and then I don’t.

Your hands. That’s what I miss. Soil under your nails. How careful you are with the small ones, like they’d break. I used to watch you through that window and forget what I was doing.

I think you’re still doing that. Just farther away. And the dirt is different.

Sasha → Eli. Day 110. Delay: 3 hours, 47 minutes.

We entered the acceleration corridor today. The ship will increase to cruising speed over the next two months. The delay will steepen.

The ship’s water pressure dropped again this week. Three engineers spent two days on it. I told them it was probably calcium in the intake filters and they looked at me like I’d suggested prayer.

I’m glad we didn’t make rules. Some of the couples on board have message schedules. Designated days. Word counts. It makes my skin crawl. We just said we’d write when we felt like it. And that the quiet parts were OK.

I still believe that. I just wish they were shorter.

Eli → Sasha. Day 120. Delay: 4 hours, 15 minutes.

I’ve been working on the garden. Your garden. I know you said Mrs. Dao would handle it, but her knees are bad and the tomatoes weren’t going to stake themselves. So I guess I’m a gardener now. I don’t remember agreeing to that.

I killed the basil. I’m sorry. I overwatered it, which you would call a metaphor, and you’d be right.

But the tomatoes are doing something. They’re climbing the stakes and the little yellow flowers have started. I don’t know if they’ll fruit, you’re the one who knows about fruit, but they’re trying.

I put my hands in the dirt today and thought of you.

Sasha → Eli. Day 145. Delay: 8 hours, 22 minutes.

The delay is eight hours. By the time you read this it will be tomorrow for you. I’m writing to tomorrow’s Eli, who will have already had breakfast and gone to work and maybe stood in the garden.

Tell me about the tomatoes. I want to know everything: the color, the size, whether they split at the top, whether they taste like summer or like the version of summer you get in a city garden with too much shade. I want to know if the dirt gets under your nails.

I know you didn’t sign up for any of this.

I’m sorry about the basil. It was always temperamental. The trick is less water than you think, and morning sun, and talking to it, which I know sounds insane. You married me knowing the risks.

Eli → Sasha. Day 158. Delay: 12 hours, 5 minutes.

The tomatoes are in. Small, ugly, and underripe. They taste like almost nothing, which is apparently what happens when a chef tries to be a gardener. But they’re red. They grew from your seeds, so I’m giving you the credit.

Mrs. Dao came up and looked at them and nodded, which from Mrs. Dao is a standing ovation.

You asked me to describe them twelve hours ago. By the time you read this they’ll be different again.

It’s late. The cat is on your chair. The window is open because the air tonight smells like jasmine and rain, and I would describe it to you in real time if we were still in real time. But we’re not. So I’ll just say: it smelled like the night we got engaged. The park. The ridiculous umbrella.

I’m here.

Sasha → Eli. Day 195. Delay: 22 hours, 17 minutes.

I haven’t written in three weeks. I need you to know why.

It isn’t busyness. It’s that I sat down to write and realized I didn’t know what day it was for you. I could calculate it, look at the delay, add the hours, but “right now” has stopped meaning anything. My now is your yesterday. Your now is somewhere I won’t reach for twenty-two hours.

I kept opening the screen and closing it. Not because I had nothing to say.

The seedlings are tall now. Some of them are taller than me. I talk to them the way I used to talk to the basil. They don’t answer either.

Eli → Sasha. Day 210. Delay: 28 hours, 40 minutes.

The garden is changing. Fall’s here. The tomatoes are done. I pulled the spent vines and the beds are bare. I stood there for a while. Thought about leaving them empty. Thought about calling your mother. Then I looked it up myself.

I’m planting garlic. The cloves go in point-up, four inches deep. It goes in the ground in fall and sits there all winter and comes up in spring.

I don’t know if I’m doing it right.

Eli → Sasha. Day 240. Delay: 40 hours, 12 minutes.

Started this four times.

It rained all week. The gutters on the building are leaking again and the super says he’ll get to it. Mrs. Dao asked me to move a shelf for her. The cat threw up on the rug, the nice one.

I don’t have anything to say. I just wanted to send something.

Sasha → Eli. Day 270. Delay: 52 hours, 11 minutes.

I dreamed about the kitchen last night. The light through the window over the sink. You making coffee. The cat on the counter. I could smell it: coffee and old wood and whatever you’d cooked the night before.

I woke up in a bunk on a ship and couldn’t breathe for a minute.

I don’t know what to say that takes four days to be worth saying. I don’t know how to have a conversation at this speed. But I know that in two days you’ll read this and maybe the coffee will be on and maybe the cat will be on the counter and for a moment my words will be in the same room as you. That’s the closest I can get.

Good morning. I love you. The seedlings are trees now.

Eli → Sasha. Day 280. Delay: 56 hours, 30 seconds.

Good morning.

The garlic’s still underground. I check on it by not checking on it.

Trees. You said the seedlings are trees now. I keep trying to picture it and I can’t. I’m still seeing the plastic trays on the kitchen windowsill with the paper towels underneath.

I love you. I’ll write again soon.

Sasha → Eli. Day 305. Delay: 61 hours, 12 minutes.

Eli.

Heliopause in two days. After that the relay network ends. Next comm window is a deep-space buoy at the Oort marker, approximately fourteen months out.

I’ve drafted this six times. They all sound like goodbyes. This isn’t one.

Tell me about the garlic when it comes up. The tomatoes next year. Spring.

Take care of the cat. Sit in my chair sometimes.

I’ll write from the buoy.

Eli → Sasha. Day 312. Delay: 64 hours, 33 minutes.

The garlic will be up by the time you hear from me again. I’ll tell you about it. Everything. The tomatoes, the cat, the kitchen. Marco came back. Apparently the oven missed him.

Fourteen months. I’ve done ten. I can do fourteen.

I’ll be here.