What do you miss while you're in space? is a question that gets asked a lot.

People expect you to say the obvious things. You miss your family. You miss fresh coffee. You miss bacon. They expect you to say things familiar to them, things that they themselves have gone without, so that by remembering what it was like for them to miss those things, they can in some small way feel like they're the same as the astronaut they are interrogating.

They don't expect you to say things like 'control'. They don't expect that, while strapped to the top of a rocket, or while floating around in a tin can hurtling around the Earth, you get anxious about the fact that you can't steer, can't stop, can't do anything to affect your fate lest you deviate from the terrifyingly narrow course between a fiery end on re-entry, and a frozen oblivion lost in space. They don't expect you to say that you miss not needing a vacuum fitting to suck out your bodily excretions and make sure they don't float around the cabin. They don't expect you to miss being able to crack a window, to miss being able to sleep in a bed without having to strap yourself into it, to miss being able to kick off your briefs and try to land them in the wash basket across the room. No one gets missing those things, because they've never had to miss those things; and saying that kind of stuff makes it seem like you're an ungrateful ass for not spending the whole time in awe of the fact that you're in space, where none of them get to be.

So you have to make up an answer. You have to practice something that sounds good to the press, and feels right to you. But when you're wife left you before NASA even managed to get a space shuttle in orbit, when your son can barely even stand to be in a room with you, and when you never really got what all of the fuss was about with coffee or bacon, you need to be a bit creative.

So this was the answer that Eugene went with instead; the thing that he missed while he was in space. It was this bar back home: this slightly murky, and yet somehow cosy little bar where he could sit on a stool and drink proper beer out of a proper glass instead of Yankee shit out of a bottle, and where people would talk to him like he was just another human being, regardless of whether they new who he was or not.

"A pint of whatever it is you're trying to get rid of, Sonny," Eugene grunted, abandoning his sunglasses on the bar and rummaging in the back of his pants for his wallet.