Thoughtful Throwback

As a child, I lived half my days thinking about the space beyond. I thought of earth as a prison, gravity chained me to the ground, and the atmosphere a dome of bars that kept me in. My mind was a universe of possibilities but my body was limited and confined in a small rock governed by the laws of physics that no one can violate even if they wanted to.

I thought of those days when I lay on the grass in the backyard and dreamed of singularities and wormholes. The world outside of my known reality was a source of endless fascination. Blame it on my addiction to science fiction and mysteries or on my hyperactive imagination, but I could remember how I often hid in the back of the basement closet and pretended that I found a tesseract that would allow me to create a wrinkle in the time-space continuum. 

Yet, despite my longing to find windows and doorways to other worlds, I had a happy childhood. I somehow found a niche even though I didn’t exactly fit in. I have learned how to mingle with those who don’t get my flights of fancy and have adapted to how the real world of normal humans worked. I reserved my outlandish thoughts for my journals and imaginary friends. And I became like everybody else. Or so it seemed.

I no longer dream about asteroids and blackholes. Aliens and time travel have been replaced by more grounded thoughts such as the meaning of life, the audacity of love, and the precision or randomness of fate. But I still stare at the moon with a longing and the stars with a sense of awe. They will always remind me of that child who dreamed with her eyes wide open, her heart burning, and her spirit dancing; who believed that she could grow wings if she thought them into existence, break out of her terrestrial prison, fly beyond the horizon, and be free at last.

Is there anybody out there?