Leaving on a rocket

My sister, the cartoonist, is doing a (in her words) "boring comic strip" about astronauts going to Neptune. It's instead of a plain old normal report like I did about Venus when I had that assignment. (If I could go back, I would either do Uranus or Pluto because no one wants Pluto anymore). In her research, we discovered that it would take twenty years to do a round trip there.

Here I am, for two years on the same planet, with the same basic way of life, and sometimes I thought (and still think) that it'll be forever, that I will never live on the blue house on the corner again. But I got to thinking--and, understand, I hate to put things in perspective. Sometimes it does not help, but it was okay in this case because I am at peace living here--and what I thought was this:

I imagined myself an astronaut, on a voyage to Neptune (and I have dreamed of being an astronaut occasionally) and I was watching Earth get smaller and smaller, and I realized that I would spend twenty years away from any of this planet, the one planet that is habitable, going to a cold other planet I cannot even land on. Not even to the moon, where the comforting blue glow of earth would be there sometimes, and I could walk on its poor dead surface. Where other people have set their feet.

Right now, I am caught up in a computer game about space travel--the science fiction kind. I don't know how I'd like it if I were really there, but that is no danger. Instead, I play the game, shipping people's valubles, helping scientists, and looking for adventure (in this game, by the way, I have yet another name--Rhia, short for Rhiannon Carter). And, actually, although I can't stand most science fiction, my favorite movie is sci-fi, though for about three reasons--good story, one planet is forested with redwoods that for some reason remind me of Washington State, even though it's California, and it made me cry. But to be really tossed into space, to really live a life of danger...? I would not like that.

So I guess the point of this all is--Earth is home and that is where I will stay, even if I were qualified to be an astronaut; and there is a difference between wanting to be thrown into a book or a movie for a time and wishing to live it for real.