A Billion Candles [10.30.3302]
31 Oct 2016Milwaki
Today was my birthday. In recent years I haven't really bothered to celebrate it, the days all kind of blend together out here in the black. The word 'days' is kind of relative too; you could be on a planet 50,000 lightyears away, but the date all around the galaxy is based of an ancient calendar back on Earth, which I'm sad to say I've never been on. I've spent hours watching her from orbit, but even for a high ranking officer in the Federation; you need special permission for docking on the ground. Maybe one day.This year was a little different than most. I've been spending the last few days inspecting and building out my new Saud Kruger Beluga: mega yacht. Ferrying passengers sounded like a interesting change. Virginia seemed to be on board with the idea, so if you're going to something, you way as well over do it. All in all it set me back about 110 odd million credits. It's been an interesting foray into the new protocols and operating procedures of transport. Feels like this whole thing is new again; I like it.
In the interim of travelling around the galaxy, taking tourists and business folk from starport to starport, I stopped off at Cormack in Procyon. My parents live there, and invited me to dinner. It'd been many years since we'd done anything like this, sharing stories and memories about my childhood; growing up thousands of light years away from here, alone with the two of them in our tiny Asp Explorer.
Their place was decorated for Halloween too, a rather arbitrary and ridiculous holiday, but I love it all the same. The photos and stories you hear from old Earth are magical; goblins and demons, werewolves and vampires, all during the Autumn season when the leaves would fall off the trees and paint the ground orange and red and yellow. Nowadays, you don't see much of that. Some ports and cities decorate for different reasons, but nothing ever across the board, universally excepted as tradition, or celebrated. Society has obviously lost a bit of it's charm. Everyone thrives on anonymity, only further helped by the vastness of the Milky Way; anyone can be anywhere, without anyone knowing. Yet, in government systems the opposite is true; while people try to retain that anonymity, the authorities do all they can do shatter your privacy and penalize you if they can.
I suppose I digress, but there's a point. It was wonderful to see the folks again, to share those stories over a great meal. It shows that though the galaxy has grown, and changed, and evolved, and melted and everything else. Despite it's strictness, and it's rules. Despite it's size and it's emptiness, that we are still human. When you go so far away, for so many years without contact with the ones you love, and when you see them again, and you speak as though you had never been apart; That love, somehow, is bigger than this galaxy.
Oh and Virginia painted our SRV graphite black to match Umbra a little better for my birthday. I like her.