The Rings of Saturn

You rise gently from your own roof and travel outward, past the Moon and Jupiter, until a tilted gold shape appears in the dark. Up close the rings resolve into thousands of fine bright lines, and then into ice: billions of frozen pieces, some finer than dust and some the size of mountains, all drifting the same way at once. You watch small moons carve clean lanes and raise slow waves behind them, hear a gentle unfinished argument about how old it all is, and then settle into the ring plane and stay.

The ending, given away now, per house rules: let your breathing go slow, and slow, and slower. There is nothing else to wait for, which is the point.

The first minute

Wherever you are as you listen to this, whatever kind of day it has been, you can let it come to an end now. It is over. It asks nothing more of you. Let your shoulders sink down, away from your ears. Let the surface beneath you take your weight completely. You do not have to hold yourself up any longer. Let your hands grow soft. Let your jaw unclench. Let your breathing slow, all on its own. There is nothing here to watch for tonight. Nothing to decide. Nothing you will need to remember in the morning. Tonight we…

Why this one works at night

A long way from anything that has ever asked something of you. Nothing out here is in a hurry, and none of it needs watching. The pace is slow and weightless, and the whole of it is cold, vast, silent. Nothing in it asks to be followed closely, which is what makes it easy to let go of.

“…There is a gap out in the outer rings, about three hundred kilometres wide—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during