Once upon a time, long ago—but not so long ago that children cannot remember—there was a small machine made of metal and dreams called Voyager.
She was not big or strong like the fire dragons or the ice giants that roar in the sky. She was tiny, the size of an old car, with antennas that looked like attentive ears and a golden heart: a golden disk that held inside all the sounds humans wanted the universe to hear someday. There they were: the cry of a newborn baby,
children’s laughter as they ran through a park,
the wind moving leaves in a forest,
the heartbeat of someone in love,
a grandmother’s voice telling a bedtime story,
the bark of a dog who never forgot his friend,
and even the silence between two people who loved each other without saying a word. Voyager left home one summer morning, with the Sun still warm on her back.
Earth waved goodbye with a tiny hand of white clouds.
And she left without looking back, because long goodbyes hurt more. At first, everything was celebration: she brushed past Jupiter as if caressing a sleeping lion, danced among Saturn’s rings like a girl in her first long dress, and kept going, and going… until the Sun became a tiny yellow dot, almost just another star, almost nothing. Then came the part few stories tell:
the loneliness.
There was no one to tell her “how brave you are.”
No one to ask “do you miss it?”
Only stars looking at her from afar, cold and beautiful, but without hugs.
And yet… Voyager kept carrying her golden disk like someone carrying a family photo in their wallet: wrinkled, worn, but impossible to let go. Years passed.
Centuries passed.
Millennia passed. One day—or perhaps never—humanity ceased to exist.
Cities turned to dust,
names were erased by the wind,
the last ones who remembered her closed their eyes forever. And yet…
there Voyager remained.
Alone.
Traveling.
With the golden disk intact,
with all our voices still inside,
singing, crying, laughing, loving,
as if time had never passed. Because love doesn’t understand clocks or distances.
Love is that stubborn thing that stays etched in metal,
that travels faster than the light of forgetting,
that refuses to fade even if no one hears it. And sometimes, in the darkest nights of the universe,
when not a single star twinkles,
the golden disk keeps spinning slowly in its silence,
playing over and over
the sound of a child asking:
“Mommy, do the stars miss someone too?” And even though no one answers,
Voyager listens.
And keeps the question
like someone keeping a sweet and sad secret
to give it someday—perhaps in millions of years—
to whoever finds her tired body floating in the void
and dares to play the disk. Then, perhaps,
in some remote corner of the cosmos,
two eyes that are not human
will fill with tears without knowing why. Because love, when it travels alone for so long,
grows so vast
that even strangers feel it
like a lump in the throat. And so,
the little machine that never asked to be a heroine
becomes the caretaker of human memory:
the one who looks after our voices
when no one else can anymore.
The end.
Julio
@spyingeagleone (X)
