crooked as corkscrews

There’s an idea in many space stories, that the cosmos is a place of transformation, a crucible in which things burn, and if humans venture out deep enough they also burn, and become more fully who they are—that even in the wildest reaches of space, there we are, most pure and dark and bright and realised, somehow coming home. Our bodies come from stars and we find in space all that we are—terror, strangeness, beauty, hope.