Letters from the Navigator, Part 3
The navigator traveled alone through space — radio silence was a lifetime ago.
Letter #7: Jupiter
Confidence is a fickle thing. It’s built up by a series of wins and sustained over successes. But it’s torn down at the prospect of a loss. I saw another comet today, and it passed far too close for my comfort. This odyssey is magnificent, filled with the most magical sights I’ve seen, but these close calls with unforgiving giants keep me from arrogance.
I’ve been here before — in this mindset — but only seldomly in my life. Although the more I travel, the more common it seems to be. One of these times, I saw the complete destruction of my confidence because of a single, incredible human. In retrospect, I’m still amazed at how truly spectacular it was, but I know in the moment it was nothing but tormenting.
Her outspoken nature contradicted her guarded sense of love. One tipsy night was all it took to give me courage — the courage to ask why she didn’t have someone’s arms wrapped around her.
The words spilled out of her mouth as if waiting for someone to break the levee. Time was a cold-blooded killer of our dreams, preventing her from feeling comfortable dedicating a relationship-status to another human, forbidding me from further questions, regardless of how many I wanted to ask.
I’d stolen glances at her since our adventures to the remote sands of a far-away beach, but her enigma kept my confidence from surfacing. I’d regressed back to the boy who admired from a distance, not risking the friendships and social circle we’d built. Too much relied on that ever-feared “yes” or “no,” so my silence bided the time, eating away at my self-esteem like termites to wood beams.
And her ambivalence towards our mutual silence furthered the narrative that I resented to believe: “she’s not interested.” But it didn’t stop the way I felt, it just built the pit in my stomach that was only solved by drunken texts to the wrong people and longing for her soul beside mine when the day was finished.
That was the narrative I contrived in my head, but narratives are inherently one-sided. Who knows the things she thought and the emotions her heart contained? Who knows the words she wished she’d spoken and the friendships she too wished to preserve? Who knows the fear she felt for rejection or the hesitations she had towards my feelings? Who knows how many nights she lay awake looking at the constellations in awe, wondering how they might align?
Confidence is how you act when you only know one side of the narrative. And with her enigmatic, unreadable face, I never could tell how she felt. So my confidence crumbled as I fell for her and froze — too afraid to take the leap. But I found peace in our small talk, and she had a fascination in the same things I did; so I held onto that for as long as I could.
To Jupiter and its moons. We never saw them from home, but we knew they were beautiful.
Letter #8: The Vacuum
I’ve been out here almost as long as the giants now. Lifetimes have passed, it seems, and with each day — at least what feels like a day — I appreciate the solitude despite my want for the life I left behind. It’s a lot easier to see clearly in a vacuum.
Perspective skews so much of how we view the wins and losses of our lives. We know too much about ourselves and too little about others to rid perspective from the world, and so too often we compare the broken pieces of ourselves to the apparently-whole versions of others. Perspective screams out our failures and whispers our accomplishments.
But even though our failures and accomplishments seem unique to us, I’ve found that so much of the time we all go through the same things. There are universal truths in a vacuum — truths based on mathematical proofs and chemical experiments. Electrons orbit in a predictably unpredictable manner, just as we operate in a predictably unpredictable psyche.
We all feel unsure, facing imposter syndrome when we look at others’ successes. We fail to see the failures that others encountered before claiming their gold medals or crowned jewels. We consistently judge ourselves harsher than others, for we see the flaws in our own ways far more often than we do in them. But we all face the same fears, hide from the same demons, and conquer the same mountains.
Perspective is the last battle to fight. And the vacuum suffocates it to its last breath.
You are comprised of the entire universe; you are the universe. You are the stars and the planets and the nebulae and the supernovas and the quasars and the black holes. You are the lions and the turtles and the redwoods and the oceans. And you, like every other cell and atom and quark, are trying to discover the universe as it exists.
You are just like the rest of us; just like me. And even though we’re all the same in this regard, this doesn’t mean we aren’t special. It just means we all are special, in the most sincere, fundamental, scientific manner. It’s a spectacle that we exist to think about the roots we grew from, that we are able to explore the intricacies of the impossibly complex fabric of space.
Every neuron that fires and every breath you take and every beat of your heart is proof that you are alive — proof that there is something worth existing for. It’s a lot easier to see clearly in a vacuum.
We can’t pass up this opportunity to figure it all out. You matter.
At first, the navigator contemplated the shared stories, wondering them too intimate to relay a million light years away. The navigator knew not the receiver of these transmissions, but after some time decided it was not important.
Whoever received the letters were meant to. And however they were interpreted, the navigator found solace in the truths behind them.
The navigator continued the odyssey through deep nothings, content for having relayed the letters in the first place.
Letters from the Navigator, Part 1
Letters from the Navigator, Part 2
Letters from the Navigator, Part 3
Letters from the Navigator, Part 4
