44: Videotape

There's a clean line taunting us, pornographic contact of earth and sky. There is nothing to it, it's just a game of knees and elbows. Up, up, up always up, any other motion is a deception, a feint to come back to up, up, and up. Our signatures are stamped in the dirt, once, twice, thrice a second. We're both Neil Armstrong today and maybe even tomorrow, and maybe even the whole week. As long as it takes for the wind and the lizards and the armadillos to erase us, to forget us.

There is immense silence between the moments where our feet slam into the dirt. We are supersonic jets, constantly booming once, twice, thrice a second. Behind us, an invisible wake, and ghosts made of dust and speed, ephemeral like songs on Mars. We are a Buzz Aldrin dream: ships made of energy. We consume what we are to make distance irrelevant. We exhale and sweat the particles that kissed our mothers and held our brothers. We keep going until there is nothing left but the going.