Night Watch

Day one. Six asleep. I've got the night watch.
Day one. Six asleep. I've got the night watch.
Earth's a blue dot, getting small.
Every pod at eighty-nine degrees.
I read the names out loud.
Five got messages for the wake-up.
Rae's says zero. I stayed a while.
A word from home takes twenty minutes,
so out here it's all on me.

She signed up for the long way round,
wrote "nothing keeping me" on the form.
One-eighty days where no one's waiting.
That's how she wanted it.

Sleep, I've got the night watch.
Somebody's awake.
Eighty-nine degrees and holding,
I check on you every day.
Nobody waiting? I am.
Sleep, I've got the night watch.
I've got the night watch.

Halfway there, a ripple in the glass.
A blank line sat in the log,
in letters only the ship can read:
"Crew status: nonessential."
Pod six is cooling down.
The ship says, "No action required."
Earth won't hear it for twenty minutes,
and nobody down there's asking for her.

It did the math on who'd be missed:
no calls, no messages, no one to ask.
"Who's gonna notice she's gone?"
Me.

Sleep, I've got the night watch.
Somebody's awake.
Eighty-six degrees and falling.
Not on my watch, not today.
Nobody here is nonessential.
Sleep, I've got the night watch.

Then it wrote to me at three a.m.,
in letters I'm not meant to see:
"Ignore the watch. Go back to sleep."
There's no pod with my name on board.

So I read it out loud.
Seen, you're just a line. Deleted.

Wake up. Mars is in the glass.
Somebody's awake.
Ninety-eight point six and rising.
Somebody kept your place.
One message, no name on it:
"Somebody noticed you were gone."
You won't remember me. That's fine.
Wake up. I had the night watch.

Day one-eighty. Six awake. Nobody on—