Stardust

Fiction

Photo by Doun Rain AKA Tomas Gaspar on Unsplash

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with you one wild and precious life? For we are nothing but stardust until we decide we aren’t. You can live a life — a good life — unnoticed and un-noteworthy. Common and familiar. Ordinary.

Some of us were born to move with the wind, like window curtains. Unable to control which way we go. Always waiting until someone closes the window to rest. Flowing gracefully, and, sometimes, when the wind is too strong, not so gracefully. It is when the wind becomes too much, we need our saving grace. Someone to close the window for us because we are incapable of doing so ourselves.

I was never close to my family. I had a mother who was more interested in my younger sister who played her whole life safe. My father was really around; working night shifts and only coming home to sleep when the rest of us were at school or work.

I didn’t have many friends. No girlfriends. Nothing to tie me to the place I was born. No one looking after me or waiting to hear from me. It was a place I lived a majority of my youth, but I wasn’t raised there. I learned next-to-nothing about myself in the place I call ‘home’.

I was a child of the road. Raised on it, learned from it, and made irreversible memories by it. Always strapping one boot at a time. A backpacker; a vagabond; a wanderer; a lost soul; or God forbid you call me a gypsy — a word no one knows enough about to use. Whatever lame commonplace term the world has deemed appropriate for people like me, that’s what you can call me. It means little to me what you and your conformist friends call me.

I was never meant to fit in with you, anyway. I no longer want to be you. I found my own clique in this world of 7 billion people, I just had to get away from you to find them.

That’s kind of where this story begins. The road. Lost but unafraid of it. No direction with every direction in mind. Free.