James Gray, in a piece of his audio commentary for his film Ad Astra, discussed the psychological aftermath of the Apollo missions on the astronauts who participated in them. As it turns out, seeing the Earth from the surface of the Moon as opposed to from a few hundred miles away can have a devastating effect. After returning, Neil Armstrong retreated to his farm and was hardly heard from again, Buzz Aldrin fell into alcoholism and the unsettingly-unfunny variety of depression that can snap every bone in your body, and Charlie Duke became a minister. Perspective can be a cruel master at times.

The film itself is brilliant and towards the top of my all time list. There are moments in it that will haunt me for the rest of my life, and I resonated with it to a degree that I had trouble coming to terms with at first. The metaphor of it was so direct and so articulate that it almost disappeared completely. It felt like a flare had been dropped into the center of my own darkness, and it fell for months.

Something that’s easy to take for granted about Space is the relationship between distance and time. When you hit the upper limit of the speed of light, they become the same thing, which feels like any other fact from freshman year astronomy class until you pick it up and turn it over in your mind a few hundred times. Why is that? I think I mean that question sincerely. Why is there a final limit on how quickly something can go?

And I’ve been wondering lately just how far that restriction extends. As a kid who grew up on altar calls and communion bread, forgiveness always felt microwavable. If it wasn’t ready after a few minutes, it was because you weren’t doing it correctly and just needed to go back and read the label. Now that enough has happened, it feels more like forgiveness takes the same amount of time as a life.

There’s something in me that flinches even as I write that. Something that’s ready to present a list of things I need to do to break free or return to myself or whatever other tired, anachronistic truth I’ve gotten so used to wearing around my neck for good luck. But I am starting to think that forgiveness is governed by that same simple constant that keeps us so far away from even the closest stars. That its definition might be tied to the length of the journey it requires from us.

In the film, the distance to Neptune feels particularly meaningful. Each individual step of the journey makes it apparent that humanity has expanded through incrementalism rather than some sudden technological awakening. We are still taking a bus to a bus to another bus, so to speak, and there is an Applebee’s on the moon. And the destination seems to represent the furthest point of return for humanity. A place we can manage to get to with great effort and still have some chance of getting home, however slim it might be.

For some reason or other, that point struck me the hardest when I was listening to James go on about the pithy little tediums that make his film, or anything really, so beautiful. I’ve known for awhile that the real difficulty of forgiveness is not the goofy little ego deaths that come with it or the gall of having to admit that you were wrong, or harmful, and so on. That stuff just seems to be the table-stakes for being alive. Instead, my fundamental difficulty has been and still is in letting go of my deep need to come back from that process the same, and for whoever the other person or persons to be the same too. I wanted forgiveness to be a formula for protecting my private world or friend group from any harm or permanent change. A tool for ensuring that I still get exactly what I want (approval and respect and acceptance and connection, in my case) even if I have to take the long way around to get it.

Spoiler

In the end, Brad Pitt’s character Roy quite literally has to let his father go. The Herculean effort that Roy went through to reach him and try to talk him back to Earth, and back to his own role as a father, was incredibly unsuccessful. In many respects, it could not have gone worse. But it was also the final, exhausted attempt from Roy to claw back the thing he felt he needed more than anything. He was going to have to accept his life in a new world without his father’s approval or recognition, or even existence, and accept who his father both was and was not during their times together.

My father and I have an amazing relationship, but the lesson certainly extends so far into other sections of my life with past friends and business connections that the film very often felt biographical. I’m 4.5 years or so into my own journey of forgiveness and letting go, which if I were moving at the speed of light would place me right around Alpha Centauri or so assuming I got my directions right. Maybe there is a version that mimics quantum entanglement or something in that structural neighborhood and trends all distances towards 0, and maybe I’ll find it someday. But for now, I feel OK with how long it’s taken me and am learning to accept that it might always be that way.