wooja's asteroid

Wooja boards the train at the horizon, where an ocean of fields melts into the clouds. The first stop is at the moon, and he doesn’t get off. The soft opaline glow soaks into him until he pulls his cabin’s shutter down. But immediately after being swallowed by the darkness of the traincar, he feels bad—the poor moon didn’t do anything to make him lash out at it. He dips his head down and whispers a small apology, but he can’t bring himself to open the shutter. If he did, he thinks he’d cry. Relief prickles over him when the train darts back out into open space (and quietly, he apologizes to the moon for that, too). 

The next stops are also silent and waitful affairs. Mars follows soon after. Then Jupiter and its small sibling moons, too. So on and so forth. Wooja lifts the cabin’s shutter for no one. No one until Pluto, which he recognizes by the chill that settles into the air, piercing through the knit of his starry cardigan. Through the train’s window, it’s nothing but a little marble, 

patchy with ruddy orange and large swaths of frost. Somewhere out in the distance swim the five moons, but they haven’t talked in a long time. At least, that’s what Wooja understands. Pluto looks sad without them. 

It takes a long time before the train reaches Wooja’s destination. 

The asteroid is smaller than he remembers it being. It’s been bruised and chipped and scarred by other comets, worn on the edges and dusty with ice and ash, but his lilac armchair is still right where it was when he left it. Or… wait. Wooja stands in front of it. Then moves to its right side, then the other side. Then holds his thumb and first finger out at a right angle. Resolute, he sets his luggage down, pivots the armchair an inch towards starboard, and then feels right enough to sit down. 

The view from his spot is as it was. Sparks of light scattered in impossible numbers, like spilled sugar. Nebulas blooming purple and pink and orange and yellow and colors he doesn’t know the names of. The wispy remnants of other asteroids’ tails fizzle around him, chilly from the length of time spent hanging there. It never looked like this on Earth, and Wooja can’t believe he almost forgot how much of it there was. The humming of distant stars rings in his bones. It’s a bigger feeling than he remembered a body could hold. 

Only then, after uncountable moments of being wrapped in it, choked by it, does he actually start to cry. He folds down into himself and thinks about herons and mountain ranges and tuna fish and strawberry blossoms and he cries and cries and cries harder until— Something nudges his leg. 

He kicks out at it, landing a glancing strike against its hard body. It just comes back. This time, it taps twice on his knee.

“Can you leave me alone?” Wooja chokes, full of water. 

A small tinny voice says back, “Why are you crying?” 

When Wooja resurfaces, pulling his face up just enough to have vision over his arms, he’s greeted by a white creature. Altogether, its body is not even hip height, and its head takes up most of that space. In turn, most of its head is a large black screen, housing green digital eyes. It holds its small arm attachments clasped in front of itself politely. 

“I’m upset,” Wooja confesses to the creature. His voice is nearly swallowed by fabric, but the little thing tilts its head as if it hears him. “I left home today. Or I guess I… came home.” “Oh!” it says, pixel eyes blinking. “I am sorry!” 

Wooja shakes his head, scrubbing the tears away with his sleeve. In space, they tend to cling to skin. He wants to say it’s okay, just to say something. But that would be a lie, and he doesn’t want to lie. 

“I left home, too. Recently,” says the thing. “I am Gowa. From the Pacific Institute of Exploration.” 

At that, Wooja sobs again, but it’s mostly a laugh this time. 

“From the PIE?” he teases, a smile pulling dryly at his cheeks. 

“Ah! This is a joke they told me many times, yes!” Gowa cheers, waving its arms. “Gowa from the PIE. We work at the PIE.” 

“And you work for them? What can a pie want out here?” Wooja has lived in this asteroid belt on this tiny rock for longer than he cares to measure. He can think of many nice things about it, but nothing that someone from Earth would want. 

“Their mission is to explore all that space has to offer, be it glorious or merely brilliant. I’m here to analyze rock samples and take photos. But,” Gowa pauses for a moment, “I think it’s just nice out here. Even if they didn’t ask for rocks and pictures, I think I would like to collect them here. I like it.” 

Privately, Wooja thinks that Gowa hadn’t been on Earth long enough before its mission to know what it was missing. Earth has enough rocks to fill a lifetime of looking. They have rocks for miles and miles underground, rocks of all different colors and types and even some that create rainbows when you let light shine through them. In Wooja’s Earthhouse, they had a few of these rocks tied up in the windows with ribbons. He would lie on the floor sometimes and just feel the colors on his skin. Even just from a few months there, Wooja thinks that Earth photos are worth far more than Asteroid photos.

“So when are you going home?” he asks Gowa. If Gowa likes rocks and pictures so much, it should go back and experience the real thing. 

Gowa blinks up at him, tilting its head this way and that. “I won’t.” 

And for a long moment, it’s quiet. Spacequiet. All consuming. A tear prickles at Wooja’s lash line, crystalline. 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, well. Me either.” 

The starry cardigan he wears now is the last thing he was given from the Earthhouse before he left. It’s soft and oversized on his frame, so the cuffs of the sleeves easily fit in his fists, dark blue and rich against his pale skin. It’s spotted with appliques of five-pointed stars, light blue and white, and glittering sequins that catch stray bits of distant sunlight, when the asteroid tilts itself just right. He stares at it and stares at it and stares at it. 

He hadn’t even meant to go to Earth, in truth. He’d wanted to see something different, be somewhere else just for a moment, but he’d underestimated how strong that wish was. It took him out so far. But no matter how much he liked Earth… it wasn’t his home. It didn’t have a view of the nebulas or his name scratched into the dust. The air was so heavy. How come he didn’t notice that until right now? It’s so easy to breathe here. Still, he doesn’t know why being back home hurts so badly. Maybe it isn’t supposed to make sense. 

“Hey.” Gowa nudges at his knee again, just as shyly as before. 

Wooja tries to tuck away everything he’s feeling until his outside frosts over white-blue again, but it’s much much harder than it used to be. 

“Yeah, Gowa?” 

“Do you want to take a picture?” Gowa holds out its hand, where a small lens now blinks. Wooja thinks about Pluto and how lonely it is without its moons around. He thinks about how far it is from the back of Neptune and how hard it is to be seen behind it. He thinks about the Earthhouse and everything he will miss about it, and he thinks about how he only recently found out that his lilac armchair is lilac because of a flower called a lilac, and he thinks about how he and Gowa have nowhere to go but here. For now. No one but each other. He smiles. “Of course.” 

Gowa doesn’t have a mouth on its screen, but its eyes curve into little green crescents and Wooja takes it as a smile.

Back at the Pacific Institute of Exploration, affectionately known as PIE, the screens will light up with several photos like this over the following years. In between pictures of rocks and surface texture and ice crystals and the sky, speckled in as if routine: a black-haired man in a starry blue cardigan, and Gowa the rover posing in the corner.