Getting there (the only hard part)

Travel days are always a write-off and this was the travel day to end them all. I won't bore you with the logistics (and honestly I signed something), but the short version is: the destination is parked in the one place nobody looks — directly behind the Sun — and getting there is the only genuinely difficult thing about the entire trip. Pack light. Pack snacks. Bring something to read for the bit where there is, briefly, no outside.

And then you arrive and there's a whole world there, riding in the shade on the back of a ship, lit up like a town that never closes. It's the thing nobody warns you about properly: it's not a ship with a town on it, and it's not a planet — it's a flat, disc-shaped world, with weather and seas and mountains, and the whole disc rides on a vessel so large the two words stop meaning different things. A world and a ship. Both. At once.

The hosts knew I was coming. Of course they did; they always know. The first message I got, before I'd even fully arrived, ended with "travel safely," which they say to everyone about everything, and which I have now started saying to my flatmate. First impressions: it's big. It's big big. They tell you not to look at all of it at once and they're right — take it a deck, a region, a horizon at a time. By dinner the scale stops being frightening and starts being cosy, the way a cathedral does. Settle in. You're a guest. Sit down.