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07 May 2021Spark Chaser
Personal Log - 6 May 3307Today my wandering toes pointed in the direction of home, Novas. I don't even think the docking clamps were fully engaged at Porges Ring before my mother was on the comms. What a lovely time to have a personal conversation with family when a hundred dock workers are connecting fuel hoses, doing diagnostics and just generally crawling all over your ship - inside and out. Credit to the staff of Porges Ring for giving me space and time to talk in relative privacy as they continued to do as much as possible without disturbing me.
My mother asked probably a hundred questions, each more troublesome than the last. Why haven't I been in home? Sure, being 250 Ly away is quite a long way, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds more I put on my ship in the last week alone. I've been putting it off and I know it. Why haven't I been in contact? I suppose I've been putting that off too. Why? I'm afraid I don't even know the answer to that question. Have I met any nice men? Of course I have, but any woman knows when her mother asks that question, she doesn't just mean "nice" men. It bemoans a lack of confidence in one's life choices. Sure, I could have settled down with Alek and never even left home. Had a dozen of his children and lived a perfectly luxurious life, albeit miserable. My home is the stars, my companion is my ship's COVAS. He's never argued with me, insulted me or berated me. Sure he delivers bad news all the time, but he never takes a tone with me. When I do cock up he never tells me I should have known better, or that he's disappointed in me. Honestly, he's been better than parents or husbands.
I never wanted to watch children grow, I wanted to watch stars grow. I wanted to hang around in a nebulae and watch new star systems being born. Now that I can do that, everything else seems... boring. I finally feel like my life is my own now, my destiny is my own. Like I'm actually deciding my own life, as opposed to being a minor character in my own life story. Out here among the stars is where I feel at home, it's where I feel I belong. Carl Sagan said "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself." I maybe helping the cosmos to know itself being out here, but it's also helping me to know myself.