On the moon Phobos, looking at Mars gives me the sick sense of falling. Not an illusion. Every Year Phobos moves a centimeter closer to it's inevitable crash. My eyes can track the long fall.

This is the place. It's right. Thers is some phosphorescent blue in my helmet, and I bite. It tastes like rust and moldy basements. After three years, I'm still not used to the taste, but the smell is like turned earth and dandelions. I've been eating blue microscopically wired fungi every day. Now I'm not sure if I'm the first man to step on Phobos, or if I'm remembering being the first human where I am right now. If the vision is mine, I still feel like it is a stolen sight. When I remember me, I will remember confusion. The stars are so bright in the black. Blue Earth hangs in twisted Taurus.

I return to my moth winged ship. My helmet radio sings of distant sun, like wineglass lightly touched. I hear waves as worlds circle. From the wall I pull a bud of the glowing blue. It twists around my fingers, feeling like it's already part of me. My hands feel sympathetic vibrations. Ripples through my nervous system.

I remember being a farmer on earth. I remember walking through fields and putting potato beetles into a bucket to drown them. Putting up fences at the edge of what we own. When they shut off the power. My brother crying because of the wild dogs. What was his name. We planted apple trees together. I remember how rough our hands got. My hands are covered in thick white gloves now.

Johnny Appleseed. We're just Johnny now. We bring out Kazakhstani fruit to places it never dreamed in it's apple tree soul. Hoping it will blossom. And we eat and eat and eat. We have no flag now.

There is water beneath the surface, but to my eyes the dust seems like a grey lake. Ripples shivering. It's my mind which ripples.

Water. It feels my sight of ice and releases. And it drinks. The blue sinks into the dead rock, finding metal to weave into microwire. I feel it drink. Tears bead in my eyes. Water.

From the hollow it emerges. Reversal of a stalk of grass idly stripped, fibers coming together. I stand before it, then beneath it in the light gravity as the blue stands with me. A billowing willow. I can feel its touch through my suit like rain while the sun still shines. I tap my helmet with the ends of my hundred branches forking into microwire. I am remembering digging through stone with a thousand thousand fingers as the stars sing the song meant only for me. I am standing still in front of something very beautiful. I am making preparations to hold, to cradle, to love myself. I know I am not only me, I have just made my way ready.

Slowly, I release my helmet's seals. It is open, and for a moment I feel the cold and the empty, but not the silence because a thousand microwires are carressing my face and I can hear the songs of everyone I've ever been singing me to sleep. And the air bursts from my lungs and my fingers reach down my throat and grab the fragile spine and pump electricity through the system. I don't even realize when my eyes pop with the lack of pressure until the vitreous fluid dribbles down my face. I sip with my branches. Every bit of organic matter helps. My roots wander as I remember.