What reading Science Fiction does to me

At present I sit cross legged, starry eyed, spinning metaphors about the distance between fanning eyelashes, melding lips and the plane ride between continents, never marveling at how so many decades ago the world was the distance of a country. The excitement of international travel is lost upon us after generations and generations who has taken it for granted.

Eons later, would poets of the future scorn how little we would do for love when the journey to the moon and back was as easy as crossing oceans and skies to another country? Would they be part of the first generation to take interplanetary travel for granted and were born a few centuries late and the giddy thrill of spiraling in space is lost on them? What if eventually there came a generation that would take intergalactic travel for granted because they were born a few eons too late to understand why people are moved to tears by the sight of a disappearing little blue planet in the solar system they learnt about in textbooks?

I don’t want the feeling of stars whizzing on my tongue and taking my breath away when I think of shooting for Mars to be lost when it becomes commonplace. How does one protect the delight of wonder and marvel? We cannot freeze it into slumber and wake it again when the time is right; we cannot build an enclosure around it and prevent poachers from touching it, not when the very land itself is slowly engulfing its own splendor inside and out; we cannot make a metaphor or a poem of it because words fade and have nothing holding the unwritten literature waiting for a chance to replace it at bay; heck we cannot even preserve it in an airtight pickle jar because glass is brittle and humans always have a tendency of being clumsy. If only there was a way to make the first time we step onto lunar soil as romantic as the hundredth time, or else we would have to venture into bigger, further and sparser space in search of boundaries to break to fuel our desire for romanticism.

At present we coin the term Universe as a receptacle for a trillion galaxies and that is the boundary of what our imagination has taken us that we have yet to reach. Perhaps one day we will physically travel to this limit and sit in the cabin cross legged, starry eyed, watching even greater space unfold. Perhaps then it is time to invent bigger words for our fervent curiosity to take us there.