Trip to Venus

Quick, get it down as fast as you can without stopping. That's the only rule, making sense of anything is not important. Just let it come.

I have a technique that sometimes helps me get to sleep during moments of midnight insomnia. I imagine that I become weightless and float out of bed, usually straight towards the window, who's gap, even if it's tightly shut, I can still squeeze through by turning into mist like a vampire.

Then I lie face up and feel the coolness of the night and rise towards the orange grey sky. Either side of me I can see the wall of the house, the windows and curtains of the upstairs rooms float past, the trees at the end of the garden get lower and lower, and once I pass their tips the lights of the city reveal themselves to me like the curtian raises on a stage and I turn to see London and all the landmarks glowing in the night.

It's not long before I can see the whole city and my bedroom looks a very long way down, the house barely more recognisable than roof in the street and the garden just a dark patch. I look around at the city with a giddy sense of vertigo but still go up and up until the air becomes wispy with cloud and the lights below become hazy and soon the whole city is just and orange glow under a layer of cloud.

It looks small, like it's tucked up under a duvet.

Then I go higer and higer and the air around me clears and the faint outline of the country comes into view, and the earth seems to curve at the horizon, and I turn around and lie on my back and the stars stare down at me.

Then I go faster and faster and pass the moon, whose lit side mirrors the crescent earth and the pair recede like a man and his dog. I enter the blackness and I'm free to go anywhere in the universe.

Last night I went to venus.

I'd seen it through my telescope a few nights ago. It has been around in the evening sky since christmas. I first noticed it on the drive back from the north east to London. My brother, who was doing the same journey in a different car text me to ask what the UFO was. Then over the next few weeks it got brighter and brighter as it came out from behind the sun and reached out as far as it will to the east, away from the setting sun, high in our evening sky, shining white bright like a star. Only it doen't look like a star when you get close up. I looked at through my tlelescope a few times. A couple of days ago, when it was getting lower by the evening, coming in to overtake us in our orbit before getting lost in the glare of the sun once again, I got home from work and took the telescope out. It's a heavy thing. I got it for my 21^st birthday, it's like a piece of soviet history, built with no frills and built solidly to do it's purpose and never ever break. I stood it out side in the cool air so the mirror and the metal tube could adjust and then pointed it through the skeleton trees to Venus. It looked like a crescent moon. It does when it starts to over take.

It sparkles. It was so bright, the photons had left the sun ten minutes ago, lit up the top of Venus's clouds and carried on towards the earth, towards London and my back garden and the telescope pointing through the skeleton trees and down the metal tube and bouncing off the curved mirror before being focused by the glass lens into my eye and hitting my retina where they eventually gave up their energy to me. It looked nice.

I floated to Venus. It got brighter and I turned over to see the full sunlit side of the planet. It dazzled me. I lowered myself face down until the surface was all around me like an ocean of cloud tops. Then I went down and the orange haze got thicker and thicker till it was no longer bright and it continued getting thicker and thicker and the light of the sun became gloomy and the depth embraced me like a tightly wrapped duvet, and I went down and down until it became dark and after a very long time the ghostly shapes of Venusian mountains began to loom above me and I lay in a plateau on some dried out lava bed scattered with boulders and the air was so hot and tight around me that it was making me sweat. And the air was so acidic it was making me sick. There was nobody around, no body on the entire planet except for me. The water had boiled off a billion years before and wrapped the planet in a suffocating embrace that trapped the heat and would never let it out again so that little by little, every long Venusian day the whole world got hotter and hotter, and the atmosphere thicker and thicker until it became hot enough to melt metal and the air so toxic it would dissolve any thing but stone and the pressure of all the clouds so great that it would squeeze the blood out of my head like a strawberry in a gorilla's fist.

I decided to leave Venus. It wasn't helping me sleep, I should have opted for a more pleasant destination, somewhere cold like the Oort cloud, but before I had time to leave Venus my alarm went off and I had to accept that It was going to be another day on planet earth.