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I’ve found, as a boy with a questionable childhood, a student living a thousand miles from home, a scientist always shunned for my beliefs, a teacher favoured for having the empathy that others in my field then lacked, and now as an astronaut, that the childish want for home never goes away. It’s always there – deep in your bones, nested in your heart like an egg with no bird therein, destined never to hatch.
I sigh and rub my eyes. We landed on Erid almost two Earth months ago, and the soreness from the high gravity has just gone away in the past week. But the nostalgia hasn’t. The thought makes my eyes burn again and I flop back into bed, frustrated, tired, fed up. I want to go home, but home is just over ten light-years away, and a snowball. Now you’re just digging yourself into a pit, I whisper to myself as tears once more warm my cheeks. No one hears, luckily, because my “bedroom” has sound isolation padding and the research centre is nigh-deserted. And even if they could hear me, they wouldn’t understand. Rocky is currently the only eridian who understands English, and he’s halfway across the globe with Adrian at some eridian United Nations-esque meeting. I wasn’t invited. I wonder why.
Of course the eridians are going to be debating how to deal with me, hell, with all of humanity and with their existence! In stories, for humans at least, aliens were rarely the good guys. Of course, there’s Star Trek and Star Wars and E.T. , but for each of those, there’s a dozen Independance Day s and War of the Worlds es. Plus, let’s be real: Erid will never be my true home. I’ll always be an outsider here (not that I wasn’t on Earth, if we’re being real), and even if we get past the inherent “us versus them” relationship, in my lifetime there will never be a collective “we” in this situation.
More tears roll down my face and I turn onto my side in my bed, holding the thick yet somehow airy and light blanket closer. I want to go home. God, what I wouldn’t pay to be able to walk to the sea. What I wouldn’t pay to pet my cat and read a book. A real, paper and ink book, not one on a screen. What I wouldn’t pay for anything but brown walls and four-foot ceilings. To see my kids smile at me, hands in the air prepped with answers. To smell the warm, salty air by the beach. To gossip with Marissa about whomever it was at her work or mine that piqued our interests. To see the glee on a kid's face as I hand back a test marked with a 100%...
Oh, god, I want to go home! Now I full-on sob. It feels good to let go and cry. The gravity of my situation, both real and metaphorical, has gone and nearly fractured me.
…To curl up with a blanket on the couch, cat by my side, and watch Star Trek , knowing the episode word-for-word. To eat real food , not Taumeoba or vaguely sweet gruel . To high-five dangling tree branches waving down over the sidewalk on walks. To see other people around me live. To see other people. To…
To live. And not in a research facility that feels like a liminal space on steroids, or in the uncanny valley of architecture. At home.
But home isn’t real. It’s not in a town in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. Not at UofT, not in San Francisco, not on Stratt’s Vat, not aboard the Hail Mary, and certainly not here.
A sob wrenches itself out of my throat and I wrap my arms around myself in some feeble attempt to calm down. The throbbing headache from crying pounds at my skull with every ragged inhale of breath I take.
A word pops into my mind suddenly. I know it has an English equivalent, but I don’t remember it. From the language Mainland, said “♬♫♪♩♩♪♫♬”, it means a longing for a place that has never existed, never will exist. And I’ve felt it forever. I used to find my home in places like the Starship Enterprise , local libraries, Bob Ross and Bill Nye, laboratories, classrooms (whether or not I was teaching), and the long walk home.
Maybe I’m doing now what I was then: avoiding the inevitable. This planet and its horrible food will never be my home. But Eridian United Nations be damned, I’ll stay here goddammit, and like it or not, I’ll live here. I’ll get up and out of bed, clean myself up, and live on an alien planet. It’s what Bill Nye would have wanted.
I gather myself and move the cloud-like blanket away and sit up, still aware of the unnervingly short walls: even though they are custom-made for me, they max out at about six feet tall.
I wipe my eyes as a smile graces my face. There’s Star Trek , labs, libraries, and classrooms on Erid. There’s the memory of the rest, and there are dozens of places for home to be found here.
Inevitable, here I fucking come!