We have lost our little girl.
We wanted her to be a teacher, like us.
Her father and I teach history, we met in college.
Teaching is safe and secure just like history. All neatly done and over with.
She never did like anything to be safe and secure, always climbing trees, running heedlessly across busy roads, loving the thrill, the excitement. It was a bad sign.
‘I don’t want to be the person giving a history lesson Mum,’ she told me in exasperation. ‘I want to be the person the lesson is about.’
So it was no surprise when she signed up for the Far Planet Colonies Project on her fourteenth birthday. Yesterday.
She will be gone from us completely in four years. Though, in most ways, she is gone from us already. She has never had many people in her life and she ended what friendships she had today.
‘My life will not begin until I arrive on a New World,’ she explained, not that I needed an explanation. Then she gave me a quick hug. ‘Don’t be sad Mum, this is what I have always wanted.’
It will be like living with her ghost.
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