Moon Living

Living on the moon sucks. For me it’s even worse. I’m a bit of a ridiculous celebrity not by choice but because I was the first child to be born in the new outer-space settlement. Before my birth, it was a mission to set up a thriving mining community on the moon. After my birth, it became a community. Everything changed once I was born. Time started on the day I made my mom and dad parents. I’m like the Jesus of the moon calendar.

My parents named be Luna, because… of course they did, dumb. Everywhere, everyone seems to recognize me. They give me these little smiles like my birth was a nice memory for them. Get over it already. It’s been well over a decade now and over a hundred children have been born. Stop staring at me!

Life is boring. Us kids are the next generation of miners so we don’t need any kind of formal education. Our lives were mapped out the moment our folks decided to leave earth and come here.

There’s nothing to do on the moon. We watch a lot of videos from earth where those kids get to go outside without full body suits on; they play sports or music or just lay in the grass and look up at the sun and, well… moon. We can sometimes see the earth too. I think the kids here have more of an infatuation with earth kids than they do with us. Sometimes the earth kids make videos about how they wished they lived up here and if I could reply to them, I’d tell them their lives are better with gravity and oxygen.

Currently, I’m watching my little brother, while we wait for our mom to get off work. She works in the lithium mines just like everyone. There aren’t other jobs here. Our entire lives were created around the mines. Apparently down on Earth, there are these things called cell phones that need lithium. It was completely mined out on the planet there so after some exploratory missions, it was discovered there was plenty here.

I glance at my wrist, where there is a small implant displaying the time, temperature, my vitals, where my parents are in relationship to where I am right now and a bunch of other stuff. One of the main reasons I’m so well-known is because of these chips. I was the first person to have it implanted onto my wrist and literally became the poster child for the device. It tracks everything about everything from location and temperature to health and time. Most the adults have them too, but not everyone. Some peoples’ body rejects them and they have theirs in a collar around their neck.

Mine tells me my mom has exited the mine shaft and is about forty seconds from appearing in the gapping doorway. I look up to see where Tellus is (good grief, my parents are awful at naming children) I know my little brother is close or my monitor would have sounded if he had gotten too far away. Like usual, he’s near the cinderblock wall that surrounds the entrance of the mining facility. He uses the hinges from a large gate to assist his climb up then jumps off, and floats to the ground. He then bobs and bounces until he can get his body back into control and onto the ledge to do it again. Six-year-olds are so easy to entertain.

“Let’s go,” I say. There’s no need to raise my voice, he’ll hear me in the speakers in his head gear. After a quick pause, his whole body turns towards me. From the corner of my eye, I see my mom. Tellus is floundering a little on his back, he’s trying to roll over so he can stand back up. I make a move toward him and enjoy the slow jog. My left foot touches down and push up with my knee and glide a little ways before my right foot hits the ground.

Tellus has gotten up and jumps with both feet towards me, it’s in slow motion as is all our movements and I easily get out of his way and watch him sail towards our mom who eagerly wraps her arms around him and they bobble a bit until they are settled side by side and start to move towards home. I bend my knees and push up as hard as I can and launch upwards, it’s sometimes fun living with no gravity. As I arc and feel my momentum shift and I start to descend, I glance at the top of the wall where Tellus had been playing. There is something black on it. It doesn’t belong there and the dark square stands out on the slate gray bricks. I move towards the wall and jump again patting my gloved hand on the top of the wall. Whatever it is moves from the ledge and hangs just above my head. I float down and watch it hover above me, it’s motionless hanging just above my head. I jump again with both hands pointing upward and easily get to the right height to grab the thing. Looking over my shoulder I can see mom and Tellus almost home as I float back down. I shove the thing into an outer pocket. Dad’s home already making us dinner. The thought of food makes me hurry as much as the atmosphere will allow.

My mom and brother are already out of the decompression room when I get home. I can smell the food dad is cooking so I hurry to join them not remembering the black thing in my space suit. After dinner, while getting ready for bed, I remember.

“I found something today,” I say to my mom as I make my way back to the decompression room. I dig in the pocket and pull out the thin black thing. It opens and there are papers lined up inside.

“What is it?” Mom asks me as she scurries me out of the disrobing room and back into the living quarters of our condominium. I hold it out to her. “Oh my goodness,” she exclaims taking it from me, “it’s a Moleskine.”

“A what?” my dad asks from the kitchen where him and Tellus are cleaning up dinner mess.

“A notebook,” she answers as she studies the papers inside. “The brand is Moleskine, my grandmother used to have one just like this.”

Dad appears from the kitchen, “Where’d you find it, Luna?”

“By the entrance to the mine,” I answer as I try and see what mom is so intently looking at. She sits and I nestle up to her to see what’s inside.

“This is handwriting,” she says, brushing her fingers over the scribbles inside, “it disappeared from earth in the twenty-first century.” She could see the confused look on my face. “Before our widget implants, before cell phones, before computers, people used pens and pencils to communicate.” She handed me the notebook.

“How?” I asked genuinely perplexed.

“The pen would have ink in it and when you drug it across the paper, you could make words or pictures, just like in this book.” I was nodding and partially listening, all my attention was sucked into this old item that was new and novel to me. “This one looks like someone’s personal journal or poetry notebook.”

Of course I knew how to read, but the words were so different and weren’t uniform in any way, but the more I studied it, the more I could figure it out.

Mom and Dad tucked us in and turned the lights out. I waited until I knew they wouldn’t check up on us and turned on a small lamp on by my bed so I could study the pages of this Moleskine. There were hand drawn pictures and stories, even a letter written to the person’s crush. It felt so cozy seeing part of this person’s life.

On the last page was a computer address. I typed it into my wrist widget. A banner ad came up about a poetry contest and it gave me an idea. I could enter one of the poems from the book. The requirements were the poem had to be read by the participant on a video uploaded to the site. I fell asleep thinking of how I could make my room look like an earth kid’s room and what I would wear for the video.

After mom and dad left for the work the next day I set my plan into action. If the angle and lighting were right, no one would know I was on the moon. I didn’t think being on the moon would disqualify me, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Tellus was more than happy to help me make the video. He used his wrist widget to record me moving the camera in and out around my face. Because my hair was always floating around my face, we decided to make the video look like I was upside down so it would look like my hair was going with gravity. We turned the posters on my wall the opposite direction so it looked like I was upended.

I found the page in the Moleskine I had like the best. None of it really make sense to me, but I felt the utter frustration of the writer and for some reason, the words resonated in my soul. I held the book up in front of me and began to read.

“The hallway is not a happy place,

Slamming doors in my face,

The hallway lives,

The hallway breathes,

As I walk and swing my keys.

I smell the sweat, the ground is wet

I stop and sip my tea.

The hallway is not a happy place,

People flood it with their haste,

I hear the roar,

My feet are sore.

My classroom is in sight

With all my might, I see the light.

The hallway seems now shorter.

Passing period is near its end.

To my class I shall descend.”

The emotions that poured out me while I read that poem seemed fitting. All my frustrations of my boring life seemed to underline what I was saying. Tellus had recorded it just right, moving the camera in and out with the rise and fall of the lyrics. We didn’t do another take, I just uploaded the first one. It felt right. Raw.

The tiny screen now read, “Thank you for your participation.” There was a date that came on after I uploaded the video but it meant nothing to me as our calendar was star-date four-thousand, seven hundred, eighteen.

Who knows if anyone will ever see the entry, if the notebook was as old as my mom said it was, the contest was certainly already over. Five days later, I got a ping on my wrist widget. I had a new message from the contest site. I opened the message and read, “Congratulations, Ms. Luna, you are the grand prize winner of this year’s poetry contest.” I continued to read, my pulse racing, thrilled my entry had been picked for first prize, “to claim your $20,000 all you need to do is-”