Things were impossible back home. Your family wouldn't be eating right now if it not for you being here. There is absolutely nothing else you could have done...

I find myself spending more and more time each night cycling through the same old excuses. Anything I can clutch onto and hold near, to make me feel for just a moment as though coming out here was the right thing to do. I mean, most of it is true; there was no work back home for a guy like me, and no relief in sight. My family would probably be foraging for food or supporting itself off microfarming if I had never left. But being a standup guy doesn't offer a lot of solace when your days and nights are an endless cycle of work, sleep, and loneliness. It's so vast out here. So black, so empty, so cold. Even the odd moment of cheerfulness or comradery with the crew is a lie - a shallow distraction from this lonely despair, this longing for what I left behind. Pretty lights on a dead Christmas tree, and nothing more.

So I sit up on my bed at night, restless and unsettled, and leaf through a few printoffs of my favorite snapshots of the ones I love. It's a silly, old-fashioned, sentimental gesture, and it probably does more harm to my psyche than good. But for just a moment, looking at those crumpled, glossy squares takes me back to my home planet, and I feel warmth again.

It was a mistake to come out here. I miss my family. I want to go home.

Art and REZQ © 2013

The story is my own.

Like the original here: https://www.weasyl.com/~mongreldog/submissions/110658/commission-space-lonely-with-sunshyne