They told me the stars would wait.

When I returned, the stations had new names. The borders had moved. The voices I remembered were gone from the channels, and the corporations we swore would outlive us existed only in employment histories.

My ship was where I had left it.

There was something unbearable about that.

I had expected wreckage. A reason to mourn. Instead, the docking clamps released, the engines answered, and the universe let me back in without asking where I had been.

I went to the belts.

Out there, beneath the slow sweep of mining lasers, I remembered what my hands had forgotten. Distance. Velocity. The sound of ore entering the hold. How to keep one eye on the work and the other on the strangers arriving at the edge of the overview.

People pass through and see a miner.

That is enough.

Somewhere, a ship is being built from something I pulled out of the dark. Someone will give it a name. They will take it farther than they should. Perhaps it will carry them home with its hull burning and one last breath of capacitor.

Perhaps someone will be waiting.

I like to think a little of my work will be there, holding it together.

My old contacts still fill the address book. Sometimes I open it before undocking. There are names I cannot quite bring myself to remove.

If one of them lights up again, I want to be here.

Until then, there is ore in the hold.

There is a route home.

There is still time.