All I can see of you now is a star.

When your children, or your children’s children, return, perhaps there will be something left of those of us who stayed behind. Perhaps they will find their cousins, separated by generations and time, but still kin close enough to recognise. Perhaps we will have made a paradise of this dying Earth, restored it to life and health, or perhaps they will find only the messages we left behind us.

We fought. We tried. We lived, even if it was only for a little time.

And you. You who I love best, you who I raised and taught and marvelled at as you became the teacher and I the student. You and those like you, the brilliant and the young who will take the ships into the stars to find a second home for humanity. Your journey is my gift to you, just as you are my gift to the future.

And now your star is fading as the distance grows between us. Now you are a dot, now a pinprick, now nothing but an afterimage. I carry you, burned on my retinas, long after you are gone from sight.