Per aspera ad astra

I coined the word ‘exogeiny’ for myself because I never really liked calling myself kin or using the word kintype. Exogeiny is the adjective form of the greek word for alien and literally translates to ‘outside earth’. As I mentioned in a post: even though I use the word alien or alien kin to describe my experiences, I think there’s a better word to explain my personal experiences altogether. In english, alien is another word for something strange or foreign, not just a word for another outer planetary species. Due to my outlook, I don't actually feel like an alien all on my own. I only feel alien when comparing others to myself. I want to classify all of my pro.toss experiences under exogeiny. By experiences, I mean my phantom shifts, mental shifts, memories, resonances, eerie coincidences and the strange attributes and beliefs I have. It’s a lot. I never cared that much about labels but I feel this label will help me. All of this will fall under exogeinic experiences.

It was frankly boggling and mindblowing to see earth from a great distance from space and knowing that I was on it in the current moment, as I wasn't around when this happened in the 60s and 70s. It gave me a great way to really comprehend my place here, in this universe. Unlike everyone else who sees earth as home, I see myself as a visitor. I constantly thought to myself, "oh man. There's a literal alien living on that planet, on that specific hemisphere, at that specific latitude and longitude right now. I'm not in the middle of nowhere, (even though the distance of space and earth's isolation does make it seem like that,) I'm at an actual location within space time, standing side ways or upside down on a planet, depending on the viewer. Even as a nonhuman, I felt things about it, but it was through a very different lens of basically the rest of humanity.

And as a former space traveler, I can't do what they did. I'm used to smooth flying ftl flights with artificial gravity, not rocket fuel and at the complete mercy of gravity and other factors. Re entry was the most terrifying thing to watch, freefalling thousands of mph, with no parachutes at first, with plasma building outside the module. If commercial planes unsettle me when they take off and land, so I literally can't comprehend what that was like at all.

For example, I didn't really see it as an achievement of my -own- species. It was more akin to watching a team from another country that I have no sort of relationship with win a race. It was amazing and terrifying at times, and there were touching moments where I was rooting for them, but I felt like I was in the outside looking in. None of these were my achievements, these were humanity's achievements, done by humans much, much smarter than me, so I tip my head crest to them for the accomplishments, even if reaching around the moon is a rather small step in the grandscale of the universe. But when you have no exotic matter available and just rocket fuel, I understand options are limited. I was more boggled at their accomplishments than the other humans around me were. I had a stronger reaction to seeing earth than one of my parents has. Surprised at the apathy of some people.

The team felt united in their common humanity and shared home. Although I am a humanitarian, this unity was something I lacked, even if earth was presently "home,". The closest look at home was when they took a shot of deep space while they were on the back of the moon. My home would be in that direction, in another universe, with a different coordinate system. I logically know that I will never reach home, and it gives me a different scope from almost everyone else. At a maximum distance of ~260,000 miles from earth, it is barely anything. Even still, I felt a bit strange when Capcom lost contact with them. For the first time since I came here, there were humans unaccounted for, outside the earth's sphere of influence. Although in the grand scale of things, they were just across a block from their house, in a huge city that would be the rest of the galaxy. (Although a galaxy would actually be much larger than a single city even at this scale, I'm not exactly sure how large it would be.)

I don't see my reflection in these accomplishments. My form is too tall, angular, and lanky, not fitting the parameters of what a human is, alhough we share much of the same traits as a fellow sapient being. That said, I am not certain why I decided to come here when I did. Surely it would have been better if I arrived a few decades later from now, unless being alive to see the entirety of the 21st century with enough memory to remember all of it to some degree was the point? That said, I don't think humans as a whole are ready to meet other species. But if there were to be ambassadors, these astronauts would do a phenomenal job.