Six crew members drift in their sleeping bags aboard a space station orbiting Earth, so isolated and so close that their inner worlds sometimes converge. They share dreamlike images of fractals, blue spheres, familiar faces swallowed by darkness, and the “raw” blackness of space stalking their quarters.

As their sleep thins into Tuesday morning (4:15 a.m., early October), the station’s constant hum returns: laptops blink new messages and fans and filters vibrate through the modules. In the galley, small remnants of an improvised celebration linger—magnet-held cutlery, floating blue balloons, “Happy Birthday” bunting for nobody in particular, and traces of chocolate and craft-made moon decorations.

Outside, Earth scrolls past in vast, shifting scenes: moonlit ocean turning cobalt under cloud tufts, Santiago glowing through haze, and unseen trade winds building a storm system that thickens into a typhoon over the Western Pacific. While the storm moves west toward southern Asia, the station tracks east, down toward Patagonia, where auroral light domes the horizon; above it all, the Milky Way looks like smoke across satin sky.

The station slips silently through time zones—Argentina, the South Atlantic, Cape Town, Zimbabwe—while Earth’s morning arrives as a thin molten line of light. The crew remember the violence of launch, the crushing force like “two black bears” pressing them until gravity fell away and the sky became space.

They are described as four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two Russian cosmonauts—two women and four men—living routinely yet improbably in Earth’s backyard, moving at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They will stay for roughly nine months, bodies subtly changing, eyes filled with difficult-to-share sights, while Earth remains their answer, their beloved, and the mother they will eventually return to.