Sarah Almans: Hi Gertrude, thank you for speaking with me today on your journey. It’s uncommon for Octos like yourself to leave after such a long time up above. What were your final moments like up there for you? How did it feel to leave a place you called home for eight decades?
 
Gertrude Joyce: It was tough. I actually thought it would be easy until I heard, Leave the window open for me. That’s what Marley said as I turned to enter the airlock.
 
And you know, it stopped me in my tracks because I’d said it so many times over the last eighty years. I’d said it to nearly every visitor. I hoped they did – I needed to know there was space made for me back on earth. Before I fell asleep each night I tried to count them all, all the windows left open a crack so that my spirit could find a resting place on the planet I’d left over eighty years ago.
 
But then he said it to me. Leave the window open for me. I recognized the plea in his voice. And it shook me, I felt a vibration shudder through my skeleton and for a moment I felt I might crumple. I grabbed his hands, clasped them in mine and promised him I will. And I will.
 
SA: This was important to you, the window tradition?
 
GJ: I believe when people on earth leave the window open an inch or two to remember those of us who have gone up, so that if our souls are drifting back to earth while we sleep we can find a resting place, is vitally important. This way of tethering to the people up here, so that we’re not forgotten, left out here in the ragged darkness, means a lot to us. The loneliness can gut you, you know.
 
But I was saying, I left with that feeling of reversal and then, as I entered the ship and we finally pulled out of the dock, I saw the moon from an angle I hadn’t seen in over eighty years. The last time I saw it that way I was nine years old and we were pulling into the dock and it looked like a cookie to me. Now it just looked like a big old rock.
 
I never thought I’d leave, but you know, I never ever thought of it as my home either. I’d been up here as long as the oldest ones that stayed, there were over a dozen of us. Most resigning ourselves to never setting foot on earth again. Boyo, my co-colonist, had wanted to go back, she talked about it all the time. Maybe on the next ship, she’d say every time the last one left. And she did get to go back, sort of, in a box. It was sad, but if she’d really had wanted to go she could have pushed her request to the top, she never did. Us Octos had Approval 3 Status which meant our requests took precedence. But I don’t even think she ever sent her request to the magistrate. A request never made is a request denied.
 
I’d sent my request at least seven times. I’d never used my Approval Status, so it was often pushed to make room for the others that urgently needed to return. Once I was booked on the ship and bumped at the last minute for a cadet that found out she was pregnant. No babies are born up here. They need an earth reality first. That’s the rule. Earth-based realities are what give us the perspective we need to stay up here far away. If one were born here, not knowing earth, the feeling of being untethered would be discombobulating. It’s unthinkable and unfair, so all the children are earth children. But you know that, I’m sure.
 
SA: What made you decide to leave for good?
 
GJ: I’d dabbled with leaving, I think that’s why I never used my status to push my exit. I didn’t mind it, and when one of us leaves one of us must be replaced, and so I figured it would be better for me to be up here instead of someone that might have a hard time. A lot of the younger kids can’t handle it. They show up excited for this adventure, they feel special and then they realize what it’s really like; the videos they show you are only a part of the truth. The shiny new Vista is smaller than it looks, and there’s a lot of old dilapidated things here that haven’t been improved. I end up feeling bad for these kids when they step out of the airlock and look around and they must feel like they’ve been had, lied to. I don’t feel that way because I’ve been here for most of the building up, and so many new ideas that petered out over time. People come and try things, try to revolutionize the place, and then give-up and leave, so it’s a mishmash of earth eras and starts and stops. There’s the weird strip mall with the ‘90s coffee kiosk, the paper coffee cups printed with the Alien Java: Coffee so good it’s out of this world! logo and slogan. Then there’s the ‘80s diner made to look like a ‘60s diner that feels eerie and empty. All pale pink and turquoise booths and a jukebox playing oldies. And the “new” wellness centre that’s all white walls and boho and fake plants from the 2020s.
 
There’s no better place to see this mishmash of earth trends than in the moon crater subdivision: houses built in earth styles differing wildly. It’s a subdivision meant for the families that come up, usually for a decade or so. They come with plans and the developers get to work figuring out what materials will work to get the house to look just like the one they left down below. Over the years they’ve done a really great job of getting the moon materials and earth materials to work to build almost anything. When I first got here it wasn’t like that. We had limited resources and most of what we used contained some kind of moonstone.

And this is what led me to leave. I can tell you the whole story if you like.
 
SA: Yes, please go ahead.
 
GJ: Well, I hadn’t been to the subdivision in decades. There was no need for me to go over there. I’ve been here eighty plus years but I’m single, never married. I have a small suite in the Tender Building, where most of us Octos live. Everything I need is within walking distance or a short rover away. The subdivision is on the other side, in the Grate Crater. I lived there when I first came here with my family back, well, a very long time ago, in 1962.
 
I work on the morphing orbs, which is desk work at a screen. I used to work with the orbs directly, as did my father. But once I hit seven decades it was obvious the outside work was taking a toll. I was slowing down and tired and sleeping all the time. So I was moved to the screens and it’s much better for me.
 
A few turns ago, a new family arrived. Their house was ready and the Vista was full of all their belongings that needed to be brought over. I volunteered to take a rover full of stuff to them. It was a slow shift and no one minded if I snuck away for a bit.
 
The drive over I kept thinking how quickly time could pile up without one noticing. I was trying to recall the last time I’d been on that road, out to the family housing craters, and I couldn’t. The road was the same, the turns, the winding, the slopes, but it had changed, it wasn’t so bumpy, new material had smoothed it out like pavement so it was flat and pleasant to drive on. Earth things we hadn’t cared about when I first got here. It wasn’t rugged anymore.
 
It took over an hour to get there and when I pulled in to the Grate Crater, the same subdivision where I’d spent my first decade on the moon, it felt familiar and entirely different. Like a memory traced on top of a memory.
I knew exactly where the new house was, where I was going, but took a right instead of a left so that I could drive past the old property. I felt a surge of nerves rounding the corner, thinking, would the house look the same, would it have been updated in a terrible way, in a good way? I didn’t even know who lived in it. It sat in my mind just the way that I left it and knew it was likely I hadn’t come out to see it over the years because I didn’t want to see it in a new way, I liked it preserved in my memory the way it was.
 
But I’ll tell you, I couldn’t have been less prepared for what I saw.
 
It hadn’t been changed, renovated, updated, or upgraded. It hadn’t been torn down and rebuilt. It was abandoned; the moonstone chalky and crumbling, the whole thing collapsing in on itself. It hardly resembled a house at all.
 
The big tree in front had barely any leaves, the circular windows were falling in, the door frames buckled and crumpled under the weight of the stone. It was barely a house-shaped heap.
 
Next door a plain house, ordinary as ever, so earth like, sat with its pristine walkway, and rose bushes, as if the lot next to it wasn’t completely destroyed. As if what was going on next door was a glitch.
 
And it hit me: The people that had been here before, they’d come with ideas and solutions and dreams. They tried things like they had on earth, they attempted to make up here like down there so that it was more liveable, that it didn’t feel like what it really was: desolate and cold and far away.
 
All that’s left of all the people that came and left are the decomposing remnants of their hopes and dreams of a better future. But the best future was behind us, the best lived dream coming true was going back to earth.
 
I dropped off the rover full of belongings and drove back over the smooth road feeling stranded. A feeling I hadn’t had since I looked out the top transom window of our moonstone house decades and decades ago, the first night we slept there. Back then I wished on all the stars and orbs in the galaxy to go back to earth. To be free of the endless black sky.
 
But now, as I drove, so many years later having never returned, the feeling of going back to earth felt urgent, immediate. As soon as I was back to my screen at my desk I sent off my request to leave and it was approved days later.
 
SA: That sounds like quite the shock. How do you feel knowing now that you’ve left, you can’t go back?
 
GJ: I’m fine with it. They say that us Octos get Moon Meld, a kind of moon mind where the thought of going back has been put on hold for so long that it no longer exists and we have bypassed the loneliness and embraced the empty expanse. That’s why we rarely go back once we’ve been up here so long. That the hectic life of earth seems too much, our minds have melded with the endless expanse of space and if we did go back we’d never be able to assimilate again.
 
But seeing that house, crumpled up like that, understanding that we’ll never change this place, we’ll never get rid of the empty feeling, the vast longing that exists up here, all I wanted was to assimilate into my earth life again.
 
Leave the window open for me.
 
When Marley said this, I suddenly saw that I mistook the expanse of space for the expanse of time. I thought that the endless darkness meant I had endless years ahead of me. The moonstone house crumbling was the reality check I needed to get away. And then, hearing Marley’s plea, looking into his crinkled face, his hopeful eyes, I understood that all that waiting, all that time stretching out around me, that I was reaching down, stretching myself to those windows, to those earth tethers. And I understand the significance of what those open windows have meant for me for eighty years.
 
SA: That’s quite the realization. Is there anything you’re excited to do back on earth?
 
GJ: Since my request was approved and I was granted my ticket back down, I couldn’t believe I’d be really leaving, after being up there for such an amount of time. I hadn’t thought of earth in that way, as an option, for so long, and as I waited through the weeks until the next ship left, I was constantly thinking about the things I’d do first when I got down, once I’d be out of the decommission chambers and able to stand out in the open on the street. I know a lot has changed since I was there, I think I’ll go to the beach, look at the sky. I hope the sun is shining the day I’m out. I’ve missed the wind and the water and the sun on the waves the most I think. But it’s hard to say. I’ve missed a lot.
 
SA: Welcome back and we hope you enjoy the new old world.
 
GJ: Thank you, we’ll see how it goes.
 
 
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.