❛ ad astra ❜

I’ve been looking out the window for eighteen years. Dreaming about what it would feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it’s not everything that I dreamed it would be?

I sure as hell didn’t come down from the God Damn Smokey Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of fucking aero plane to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity, they’re the foot soldiers of a Jew hating, mass murdering maniac and they need to be destroyed. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are, and they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.

Memory, it’s a funny thing. People want to believe they are what they choose to remember. The good stuff. The moments. The places. The people we all hold on to. But sometimes we are what we wish we could forget.

“I wonder if he misses me. Misses the boys. Wherever he is, I hope he’s happy. That’s all he ever wanted, really. To have a good time. I just hope he found it beyond the bottom of a glass. Because real happiness, real friends, those are things worth living for, worth fighting for.”

-Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978) -Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019) 

What did he find out there, in the abyss?