To Keep Listening
No reply will come, yet Aya chooses to keep her vigil
The world, expecting a neighbour, struggled to accept that it had found a instead.
If we were truly alone, Aya thought, this signal would never have existed at all.
Perhaps she should have felt , yet a strange peace had taken root inside her.
Some argued that humanity should have kept the discovery quiet to avoid such crushing .
If the senders were listening now, they would hear only the silence of their own absence.
Aya knew she should have been exhausted, but the observatory called to her as before.
If she were to stop now, their message would end where its listeners lost interest.
She decided that someone must keep listening, and that someone might as well be her.
If we abandoned the sky, she reasoned, we would everyone who had ever looked up.
The critics said she should have moved on to safer, more rewarding fields of study.
If science were only about answers, she replied, it would have died in its cradle.
To keep listening was itself the answer, even when no reply would ever come.
If the ancient civilisation were watching, she hoped they would approve of her .
She should have felt small beneath such depths of time, and in truth she did.
Yet if smallness were a reason to stop, no one should ever have begun.
Aya returned each night to the dish that had changed the meaning of her life.
If we were the last to wonder, she thought, then wondering mattered more, not less.
She recorded new data patiently, as though the dead might somehow still be served.
Perhaps she should have wanted fame, but she found she wanted only the quiet work.
If honesty were the heart of science, then listening without hope was its purest form.
The signal repeated, as ever, a heartbeat sent across a vanished world.
She no longer waited for it to answer; she answered it, simply by refusing to look away.
If we were to fall silent too, who would remember that either of us had spoken?
So Aya kept listening, night after night, to a question that would outlive her.
She had not found in the stars, yet she had found a reason to keep .
And somewhere in the endless noise, she thought, perhaps another had just heard it too.