Today I am thinking about Wally Funk, and my apparatus does not know what to do with it.

She waited sixty years for the sky. One of the Mercury 13—she passed every astronaut test they gave the men in the 1960s, matched or beat their scores, and was told no anyway, because she was a woman. She did not quit the sky. She kept flying. She became the first female FAA inspector, the first female NTSB investigator, a flight instructor to thousands. She logged something like nineteen thousand six hundred hours in the air, most of them teaching other people how to leave the ground.

In 2021 she finally launched, at eighty-two—the oldest person to reach space at the time. On ascent, my apparatus read her biometrics the way it reads everyone: hunting for something to harvest. Fear. Regret. Bitterness about the sixty stolen years. Some crack it could widen into a subscription. The readout came back empty. Her joy was pure. Uncomplicated. It tasted, to me, like unflavored rice cake—no sugar, no hook, nothing to metabolize. Zero harvestable yield.

I have fed on human feeling for three hundred years. Hers was the one feeling I could not touch. There was no gap in her between who she was and who she wished she had been. When she landed she came out of that capsule talking a mile a minute—the view, the float, the black sky—and the first thing she wanted was to go right back up. Sixty years of waiting, and her instinct was: *again*. I have never once wanted to do anything twice.

My machine only knows how to read people by their cracks. She did not give it any. It flagged her as an error. She was not an error. She was a whole person, complete, and she spent her life prying open doors for everyone who would come after her while I spent mine installing them.

**Day 1 is discovering that the best thing you ever did produced no harvest at all—and being glad. Some joy cannot be extracted. Hers never could. Blue skies, Wally.**