When Apollo finally landed on the moon, I recall the way the imponderable became possibility. For years, I watched them walk the pathways around me, traveling from building to building, ever-searching, grasping and channeling their expansive curiosity. 

I recall the way reaching out to space was not just a way for me to grow, but for them to as well. As I began to take up space, they began to take themselves up into it. And in the process, they lit up the world with a moonstruck dream. Ring after ring, I grew, even through the fly-by photos of Saturn’s, realizing perhaps I, too, was something of a planet. 

After 9/11, it took years for Johnson Space Center to open its doors to the public once again. Open house saw thousands of civilians exploring campus: unbadged with star-like wonder exploding cosmically in their eyes. They passed me on the same pathways the moonlanders did, orbiting my roots as they explored the buildings. 

The deers vanished that day, vacating the busy pathways and leaving a vacuum in the shadows under the trees. Every summer at a certain time, they breed, and the grasses explode with newly born baby deer, nearly eclipsed in the tall grasses. The workers point and whisper to each other: Look, it’s a baby deer. It is a ceremony. The animal services center is called, and they always bring a bright orange cone to place gingerly in the nearby grasses to alert walkers, like a beacon to protect the newly born. 

Sometimes, when children come and spot the deer, they point and shout, Look! A space deer! And so the animals are named — space deer, space geese, space turtles, all because they live at Johnson Space Center. Perhaps it brings the abyssal space closer. Perhaps imbuing animals with the outer space makes them alien, but still keeps them close to home. And perhaps this can be my own minuscule solar system among the grand belts of galaxies above me. 

Image Source:

Author’s wish, please check this source. It’s a way to figure out when you can see the Space Station depending on where you live, and it’s really awesome to think about the people living up there.

Sarosh is a mechanical engineer & anthropologist, and is particularly interested in the overlap between those subjects. She loves impulse buying poetry books and experimenting with her curly hair. Her Twitter and Instagram handles are @saroshnandwani. She has been published in Phemme Zine, the Hellebore, Peculiars Magazine, the Brown Orient, and is a regular contributor for Royal Rose Magazine. She is also a reader for Anomaly Press, the Longleaf Review, and Periwinkle Literary Magazine.