Marika returned to Earth without announcing it.
No cameras.
No delegation.
No ceremony.
She wanted one ordinary morning.
Perhaps that was the only luxury she had never learned to appreciate.
She walked through an old neighborhood in Thessaloniki.
The buildings were familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Balconies had changed.
Trees had grown.
Some streets had disappeared.
Others had remained exactly where memory had left them.
She stopped before a small apartment building.
There was nothing remarkable about it.
A cracked entrance.
Two bicycles.
A faded plant pot.
A window on the third floor.
Marika looked up.
She had never lived there.
Yet she knew the window.
Inside the building, an old woman was watering plants.
Marika knocked.
The woman opened the door.
"Yes?"
"Excuse me."
"Can I help you?"
Marika looked toward the corridor.
"I think I used to know someone who lived here."
"Who?"
Marika hesitated.
"My mother."
The woman smiled.
"Then you should come in."
The apartment smelled of coffee.
Not recycled air.
Not laboratories.
Not Mars.
Coffee.
Warm bread.
Soap.
Dust warmed by sunlight.
Marika suddenly felt younger than she had felt in decades.
The woman pointed toward a chair.
"Sit."
Marika obeyed.
On the wall hung an old photograph.
A young woman stood beside a tree.
She was laughing.
Marika stopped breathing.
"Who is she?"
The old woman looked at the photograph.
"That?"
She smiled.
"That was my sister."
Marika stared at the image.
It was not her mother.
But the resemblance was extraordinary.
The same eyes.
The same way of standing.
The same hand resting lightly against the tree.
For a moment, Marika thought time had made a mistake.
"She died young," the woman continued.
"How young?"
"Twenty-three."
Marika looked again.
"What happened?"
"Nothing dramatic."
The woman shrugged.
"An illness."
Marika nodded.
She had seen civilizations disappear.
She had watched stars collapse in simulations.
She had travelled beyond the boundaries of known space.
Yet the sentence hurt more than all of them.
An illness.
Sometimes the universe did not need a catastrophe.
Sometimes a person simply did not have enough time.
"Did she have children?"
"No."
"Did she travel?"
"No."
"What did she want?"
The old woman smiled.
"She wanted a garden."
Marika closed her
eyes.
The woman continued.
"She used to say that one day she would plant something that would
outlive her."
"Did she?"
The woman pointed toward the balcony.
There was a tree.
Small.
Old.
Its branches reached toward the sky.
Marika stood.
She walked outside.
She touched the trunk.
The bark was warm.
"How old is it?"
"I don't know."
The woman laughed.
"Older than me."
Marika smiled.
"Then she succeeded."
They stood together beneath the tree.
Neither spoke.
After a while the woman asked:
"Why did you come?"
Marika looked toward the city.
"I think I was trying to find someone."
"Did you?"
She thought about it.
"No."
Then she touched the tree again.
"Something."
The woman looked at her strangely.
"Did you find it?"
Marika smiled.
"I think
so."
When she left the apartment, the afternoon sun was low.
Athens had begun to glow.
Marble walls.
Old stone.
New glass.
The city existed between memory and invention.
Marika walked without direction.
For once,
she did not need one.
She reached White Tower at sunset.
Marika sat on a stone and watched the light disappear.
She thought about Mars.
The garden.
The unknown leaf.
The letter.
The meeting with Elon.
The universe.
And suddenly all those enormous things became very small.
Not insignificant.
Small.
Like a seed.
Like a hand.
Like a woman's unfinished life.
She opened her notebook.
For the first time in years,
she wrote about someone who had never travelled.
Someone who had never seen Mars.
Never seen the Titanic.
Never stood beneath another sun.
Never asked what existed outside the universe.
Someone whose entire cosmos had been one apartment,
one balcony,
one tree,
one short life.
And Marika understood something.
Not every human being needs to see the universe.
Some people are enough
to make the universe worth seeing.
She closed the notebook.
The final sunlight touched the Parthenon.
Then disappeared.
Marika remained seated in the darkness.
And somewhere below,
in an ordinary apartment,
an old tree continued growing.
Quietly.
Without knowing
that it had just become
part of the story of a woman
who had travelled farther than anyone
only to discover
that the smallest lives
were never small.
End...for now in my dreaming fantasy.
