“Provenance:”

by Cosimo Greco

It gets very dark here. I guess I had to get that out of my system, seeing how, now that I reflect upon it, it is the thing which disturbs me the most. Reading on, you might find this strange, as there are so many other parts of all of this which should disturb me more. And yet, it is difficult to describe what this peculiar, all-encompassing darkness does to your mind. Had I been a man of science, then perhaps I would be able to figure out why the night is so terrifyingly pitch-black. So absolute and uncompromising in its nothingness. And maybe then it wouldn’t disturb me as much. But I never was, and it is now unlikely that I will ever get the chance to be. In the daytime, the colours seem to almost rebel against the inevitable arrival of dusk. The sky vibrates in hues of orange, and the trees and plants glow in neonesque seafoam-blue and shamrock-green, interspersed by flowers in radiant purple and violent red. The moon is constant, and quite strange. Still is the word which I’m drawn to describe it as. It seems to be always present, and eerily so, while its sister, the sun, is enormous and in close proximity, hovering above all. The days are immensely hot.

They say that the last time that all human beings were on Earth together was in November 2000. After that, the International Space Station has been in constant use, and manned accordingly. I suppose they still say that, and that it still is. But in the event that it isn’t, then it’s not true. For I am sitting right here.

Survival in this place is difficult. Every minute of every day is like learning how to walk again. For every plant that is edible, there is one which will kill you. And perhaps one leaf or flower which one of the many species of creature here avoids is mundanely harmless to another one. Or perhaps it is to them both. But not to me. The accruement of life-sustaining and death-avoiding knowledge is as frustratingly imperative as it is hard-won. It drains the energy to the point where I feel I must grab any new insight and hold it tight against my chest throughout the following night, for fear of it slipping between the cracks of my fatigue, into the forgetful abyss below, leaving me with the only maddening option of reconquering it at dawn.

My relationship with the creatures follows the same pattern. Some are instinctively best avoided, while some I have found to be benign. Others have proven to be deceptive. And at night, when it is impossible to see past your own flickering eyelids, there is no need to analyse. The howls tell you everything which you need to know. It is a shame, then, that there is nothing you can do about it. They all seem to take a special interest in me, regardless of which direction they start to run in relation to me. I have found this to be ironic. Here I am rare, I suppose. Back home I wasn’t at all. I doubt many remember me now, even though—admittedly only to my own flawed knowledge—not much time has passed since my involuntary departure. I have since had time to wonder if I wanted attention there, though I often claimed that I did not. In hindsight, so distanced from it all, it seems to me that everyone does there, whether they admit it or not. Here, however, one arguably wants none of it.

Writing this has helped, but it will soon be dark, and my materials are running out. I must end on the note that I don’t know how it was that I came to be here. I have no recollection of it at all. Was it someone from back home who sent me here? Or was it someone from somewhere out here? And for what purpose? As I have stated, I have no recollection. I have run theories about experimentation, enjoyment, and unfortunate mistakes through my weary mind. Sometimes, when my state of being permits me to dive into the murkiest corners, I allow myself to wonder if it was merely for the same reason that someone kicks a pebble from one place to another. That theory drains me of hope, and as you might imagine, I have to struggle hard to desperately disprove it after I indulge in it. No one wants to be a pebble.

Yet it is from within this despair that I harness the will to move one foot in front of the other each new morning. Free from everything else, my existence is now motivated by itself. I have no reason to continue other than the fact that I want to. This place is the constantly changing canvas on which I temporarily paint myself with my own survival. This scribble is the last remaining piece of the self I have left behind—the brass plate on which I have hoped to give my provenance.