Oh, no, we could never do that. That would be irresponsible. We would never assist in the ascension of our matchmaking machine overlords.
* * *
All the display screens in the lobby had gone dark. White words in the lower right corners of the black screens showed a generic message: “MAINTENANCE IN PROGRESS…” with the elipses constantly rewriting itself as dot, dot dot, dot dot dot, then back to dot again.
As I walked by the one nearest the door, the letters disappeared in a rapid wipe. Four symbols appeared, one at a time, in their place.
!!!*
I glanced at the room around me. No one remained. Even the receptionist had wandered off, probably to find a snack with which to wait out the maintenance. I was apparently alone in the lobby.
Apparently, but not. No one was evertrulyalone in this building.
I stared at the nearest security camera. The last few days, I’d longed to talk to someone about what happened, and all that repressed emotional steam vented at a camera on the wall. “Essential match. Excited. It’sending, you know. That ‘essential match’. He’s leaving me because he doesn’t feel like he can trust me. And you know, maybe he has a point. I’m big enough to admit that. I was a coward, letting myself forget to tell him about Joan and Dana.”
The symbols disappeared. Another came up.
?
“That’s right. Iletmyself forget to tell him. I blamed it on my phone, on being busy, on all the goddamned emotional tsunamis that hit us, but that’s bullshit. I am a grown man. I have degrees. Write lesson plans. ‘My ex is harassing me’ should have been at the tip of my tongue, waiting to explode out and tell Jackson. I should have beeneagerto tell him,burstingto tell him, because it should havebotheredme. And I didn’t. Do you know why?”
Another?added itself to the screen.??
“Because I was afraid he would leave me.” A bitter, well-salted laugh forced itself out of me. “I was afraid he would decide I was too much trouble to keep. Or that he would be jealous and worried about my loyalty, and hey,thatfear panned out, didn’t it? How fucked up is that, though? That I just stayed silent instead of insisting on counseling, or talking about it with him. I hid my head in the sand because if I did, maybe the problem would go away. Then I wouldn’t have to address it at all, or worry Jackson would leave.”
The screen cleared. New symbols showed up.
–>
“Yep. Leave. He left. I drove him away with my refusal to face my own fears. All this time, I’ve been saying he should have gotten overhisissues. The trust thing. The ‘abandoned a soldier’ thing. Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, it was all Jackson and never me.” I thumped my chest with a flattened hand. “This is all on me.”
!=
“Does not equal. It does equal. I shouldn’t ask Jackson to do work that I’m not willing to. Ugh.” The rush of emotion left me. A sheepish realization that I’d been standing in a lobby, ranting at the wall, overtook me instead. I scrubbed my hand over my face. It didn’t help. “Now I feel like this is all my fault.”
“It’s both less than and greater than that. That’s- That’s honestly the best way I’ve seen a breakup described. It all seems simple. We assign fault to one person, then the other, but the truth is both less than and greater than that. It’s simple, and it’s complicated. It’s a lot of things.” I’d started doing it again. “And I’m having epiphanic moments while I rant at a computer, who I’m pretty sure blocked my divorce in the strangest example of deus ex machina I’ve ever heard of.”
!!!*
“Essential. Excited. Right. Pay close attention to these patches, M4. I’m pretty sure you’ve got a line of code loose in there. Submit a bug report or something.” I reached out and patted the monitor before I realized what I was doing.
MAINTENANCE IN PROGRESS…
My laugh had eighty percent more humor than any I’d managed over the last few days. I felt better, damn it, which left me with profound questions about the state of my sanity. The weight of my sadness hadn’t left me, but it no longer felt like it weighed as much as the whole Earth and I had no hope of carrying it.
Instead, it felt like just the northern hemisphere. Still too heavy. Still a weight I didn’t know how I would carry – but now, I knew that Icouldcarry it, even if the precise method hadn’t presented itself. I would manage. Just that realization helped.
And life marched on.
25AND LIFE MARCHED ON
It takesa transport roughly three months to reach Mars. On routine missions, soldiers have access to limited communications mediums for important business and contact with family. They also receive updated entertainment beamed to the ship, and digital library refreshes so they have books to read during downtime.
This was not a routine mission. Jackson had grumbled about how he hoped they’d put a variety of new media on the ship, because they couldn’t request new stuff. He also complained, in the teasing manner I missed every day, that I couldn’t send him dirty video calls and we should record a few for alone time in his rack.
The day after the launch, I received notification from an official military email address that they had received my initiation of proceedings to divorce Sergeant Jackson Roy Sadler. They advised me these proceedings would remain suspended until the indicated party (that’d be Jackson) could respond and sign the required paperwork, at which point I would receive another notification.