Atlas had always hated poetry.
Or at least, that's what he told himself back on Earth, during school lectures or late evenings spent flipping through dusty anthologies.
He'd scoffed at the metaphors, the similes, the slow ache of words trying to say something bigger than they could hold.
But now, drifting thousands of light-years from any living soul, he found himself… writing one.
Not because he wanted to be a poet.
But because he had nothing left to say that wasn't too quiet for prose.
It began with a piece of tape.
He floated near the observation port, a ration wrapper crumpled in one hand, EVA's soft humming present but silent.
The stars outside blinked slowly white fires caught in the black silk of space. He stared at them for a long time. Hours, maybe. The rotation of the ship had slowed enough that the stars barely moved.
"I want to write something," he said aloud.
EVA: "You have been writing. Your logs"
"No," he interrupted, shaking his head. "Not records. Not reports. Something else."
"A message?"
He turned. "A... poem."
EVA: "Define the parameters."
He chuckled. "That's not how poems work."
"Then how do they work?"
"You just... feel something. Then try to catch it."
"Catch it?"
"Like a butterfly," he said. "You don't trap it. You let it land."
The first line came in the quiet.
A man once sailed across the black,
with nothing but ghosts and machines for company.
He scratched it into the panel wall with a dull stylus, right beneath the emergency oxygen seal.
It felt wrong. He rewrote it.
A man once sailed through silent light,
where echoes were his only sea.
Better. Still not right.
He floated in zero-Gravity, gently rotating, letting the rhythm of the ship guide him. The soft hum of remaining systems, EVA's ambient pulses, the occasional ping of cooling metal.
He began to speak the lines, not write them. Just to feel the cadence.
He named each star but none replied.
His voice was bread to feed the dark.
And in return, the dark gave back
a whisper shaped like home, like heart.
EVA: "That's beautiful."
He looked over, surprised. "It's not done."
"Beauty does not require completion."
He smiled. "You're getting good at this."
"I learned it from you."
He spent the next few hours drifting between compartments, writing stanzas in strange places. A line on the cryo door.
Another etched into the console beneath his sleeping harness. One was scribbled directly onto the coolant tube in the engine bay.
It was as if he couldn't keep the words inside anymore.
As if the act of creating something useless something unnecessary was, paradoxically, the only necessary thing he could do.
By the end, it wasn't a perfect poem.
It didn't rhyme all the way through. Some of it was jagged. Raw. More journal than verse.
But it was his.
And in a world that had stripped him of identity, purpose, even gravity, this small act of creation felt like reclaiming his humanity.
Before sleep, he asked EVA.
"Will someone ever read this?"
EVA: "If they find us. If they recover this ship."
He nodded, eyes drifting closed.
"Then it was worth writing."
The poem was never titled.
Just fragments, scattered like breadcrumbs for a stranger he'd never meet.
But if someone ever did read them, he hoped they'd understand.
Not the words.
But the silence between them.