A Long Way From Home

A Long Way From Home — page 3 — This is what happens when your parents won’t spring for a new phone I think to myself I have more important things on my mind though Things that aggravate the knot in my stomach stomach which has its own unpredictable personality Sometimes when Mom asks me about it she does this thing with her eyes that makes my obsessive thinking seem like an extra member of our family I’ve been to a few different doctors and psychologists psychologists though none of them really help They do try It’s their job to try But no therapist in the world can actually change any of the things that are making me worry because they’re big things problems no one seems to know how to fix No one can even agree on what the main problems are Things are just not okay I find out we Mom Dad me and my cat Jones are moving because Mom got a new job It isn’t just any job either Mom’s a physicist A PhD She’s always saying she wants to do something astonishing and significant with her life And she wants the same 2

A Long Way From Home — page 4 — for me That’s why she’s always bugging me to finish finish my math homework and apply myself because the world needs my talents So now she’s going to work for this aerospace company that’s trying to get humanity farther into space faster and cheaper than has ever been done before using a new kind of rocket called the Athena Heavy The company SpaceNow has a big plan to strap twenty-seven of these rockets together and eventually eventually get humans to Mars in something like comfort The SpaceNow engineers are exceptionally good at applying themselves so Mom wants to help them And since my mother is an overachieving genius she’s been invited to do just that Which means she won’t be working from home anymore like she’s been doing most of my life and we’ll have to leave Pennsylvania Pennsylvania for Florida specifically Merritt Island along the Space Coast in the middle of my summer break I wonder if maybe the SpaceNow engineers and I have something important in common We look around at Earth right now at the burning rain forests and rising seas and say Bring me my rocket please I have an 8 15 f light to Not Here 3

A Long Way From Home — page 5 — I’m working on a theory Mom is a scientist who is always using theories so why shouldn’t I My theory is we are all of us right now living in a dystopia Sure our dystopia is maybe a teeny less obvious than the ones in some stories But think about it do the people in the backgrounds of the books and movies even realize they’re living in a place that is off A few of them sure But not most There’s a constant low-key dread in the air It feels like the world is holding its breath as if the bottom bottom could fall out at any moment as if something important is permanently broken My best friend Olivia is trying to talk her parents into letting her be homeschooled from now on She says she feels safer when she doesn’t have to leave the house too much She says she’s happiest in her room Think about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch It’s this enormous churn of plastic and other trash f loating in the ocean between California and Hawaii The whole disaster is in international waters so no government is doing anything much about it The Patch is twice the size of the state of Texas and very difficult to clean up because some of its particles the ones getting eaten by sea life are extremely small There are something like 1.6 trillion pieces of 4

A Long Way From Home — page 6 — plastic out there swirling swirling swirling around in the waves The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t unique either It’s just the biggest of five Imagine you’re a fish who usually lives deep in the ocean You swim toward the light above for a nice big meal You power yourself through the water toward the promise of the sun and some delicious looking morsel catches your eyeball You swim and swim straining to reach the light and that yummy morsel You gulp it right down But it’s not food It’s a broken plastic container Or forget about the fish It’s not like humans don’t have our own problems Think about the glaciers glaciers you’ll never get to see Think about f loods and power grid failures Are you an animal lover Sorry to hear that since hundreds of species of animals are about to disappear forever Dystopia Last semester one of my teachers Mr Arnold who teaches sixth-grade concert band did kind of help me when my stomach knot was getting a lot worse after the latest mass shooting I talked to him sometimes in my clarinet lesson during f lex hour I explained my dystopia theory and his eyes crinkled up like he was about to laugh Then he coughed and 5

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