Prayer For Birth

“Prayer For Birth”

         I often forget how it was that I was sealed into this transparent casket in that station orbiting Earth.  They told me that once formed it was impervious to heat and cold, that it would take the strength of a laser beam to damage it.  We thought it was flawless and we were right.  That's where it all went wrong.  It was a new space-aged glass that contained heat and conditioned the air.  It filtered the carbon and generated my oxygen although no one knew how.  There was an unpredicted down side which later caused me to believe it to be a curse.  It stopped my aging and even though a millennium has passed, my hands show no age.  I’m not one second older than the day I left.  The food I ate ran out with the water nine-hundred and some odd years ago.  Existing in a millennium of filth and self defecation I welcome death as I sail on.  I discarded my clothes a week after I left; they now hide much of that filth.  I’m as a baby, floating in the womb of a galaxy, with only a prayer-for-birth to stave off the insanity that has inflicted me thousands of times.  When they launched my capsule from the space gun I was to go as fast as light.  Here I am and I could swear that I’m not even moving.  If not for the change of scenery, I would be right.  I’d seen nebulas below me, novas behind me and wonder all around as I sail on.
         Days and nights I know no more but had this been this morning then I awoke in time to see the greatest wonder yet.  Beautiful lights pulsing in patterns of white, red, blue, green and yellow dance all around.  It is the first life I’ve seen since my journey's start.  Hope washes over me. Goose bumps plague my skin for the first time in... 
         I could see in the distance a ribbon of structures.  Just as with most new discoveries, I approached only close enough to see but never close enough to touch the wonders there, here and now aft to me.  I sail on.  The dancing lights dissipate as I pass the ribbon.  My excitement ends.  In the blink of an eye, the new friends I had made just a second earlier are now gone. 
         Their lights, now blackened out, are my proof that my momentum is unchanged and my fate sealed.  Now I see a nebula two thousand more years, or so, away and right in my path.  How exciting!  If I’m lucky... Maybe… Just maybe… I’ll hit something and…  Once again the insanity is griping me and there’s nothing I can do as I sail on.  I have to wait two thousand more years, or so. What will I do?  My scream echoes out into the deafness of my own space. I sail on, to madness and uncertain ends.