The Cosmonaut Who Stayed

I went up as the citizen of a country and I have spent eleven years as the citizen of a silence.

They sent me to the station Zarya-9 for a tour of one hundred and eighty days, and I remember the launch the way you remember the last ordinary morning before a diagnosis, in unbearable and useless detail — the smell of the capsule, the cold weight of the medals they pinned to a flight suit I would outgrow the meaning of, the anthem playing as the gantry fell away, the faces of the men who had built me and would, within the year, cease to exist. For while I was making my slow bright circles three hundred kilometers above it, the country that had launched me came apart. Not in fire, which I could have understood, having been trained for fire, but in paperwork, in the quiet administrative death of a thing that simply stops being agreed upon, the flags coming down and the names changing and the budgets dissolving and the agency that owned me and the station and the very air I breathed becoming, over the course of a single grey autumn I watched only as a change in the lights of the cities below, a thing that no longer was.

There was no one, after that, whose job it was to bring me home. That is the whole of it, and it took me a long time to understand that it was not cruelty, that no one had decided to abandon me, that I had not been sentenced or betrayed in any way a person could be held responsible for — I had simply fallen into the gap between one world and the next, a line item on a budget that no government any longer admitted to having inherited, a citizen of a state that had been dissolved, holding a passport from a country that the men who might have rescued me would have had to commit an act of historical archaeology to even name. The successor states quarreled over the debts and the borders and the warheads; no one quarreled over me, because I was not an asset anyone wanted or a liability anyone could be sued for, I was an embarrassment orbiting at eight kilometers a second, a woman in a tin can who reminded everyone of a thing they had all agreed to stop remembering, and the kindest thing the new world could do with the inconvenient fact of my continued existence was to not bring it up.