Ishmael Gradsdovic enters the Angst Zone in part twelve of the papers...
None of my love affairs have ever reached escape velocity. There's a horror involved in watching each one in its parabola -- starting enthusiastically in a fit of smoke and fire, reaching zenith quietly and unperceptably in the silence of space, then groaning, screaming and glowing red-hot in the friction of reëntry before exploding upon contact with the surface.
Is it hope or something even more stupid that makes me emerge, barely ambulatory, from the burn unit of love and stumble like a mummy, trailing bandages, to the next launch site -- my thumb up to hitch a ride on the next launch?
How can I look at any relationship as other than a tragedy -- a finite story whose heights of love, passion and romance only serve ultimately to point out the high-water mark from which the fall commences? Is it better to have loved and lost repeatedly than to have learned your lesson the first time?
Is the rocketing, stratospheric high worth the final crash and humiliation of stumbling through the ruins, starving, hysterical, naked, desperate to quench the ache in your heart with cupid's needle in your vein?
No question about it -- I'm hooked. Lord knows what I won't do for a fix. Bring on the next spaceship. Ad astra, ad nauseum. And when Ground Control to Major Ishmael says bleakly that I'm losing altitude (she's breaking up, she's breaking up), what will I do but order more power to the boosters and pray for some James T. Kirkean miracle (plot complication showing up on scanners -- I'm switching to visual) again, and again and again...
In the burn unit of love, no I-told-you-so, no revocation of the pilot's license. Above my bandaged eyes a bright light and voices (We have the technology; We can rebuild him.)
Like some Michael Moorcock anti-hero, immortal but living to die again and again as the champion of a thankless cause, doing battle in human form on a mortal battleground for a war being waged by capricious and incomprehensible gods for divine rewards inaccessable to humans.
Oh do I pity the poor fool who gets on the next rocket-ship with me.
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