Moving On

Dear Diary,   Good morning! Oh, look, we’re still on the ship. Because of course we are. Where else would we be?   I’m starting college today. I’m not as excited as everyone expects me to be. I can’t help wondering...why bother?   As of yesterday, I’ve had my last four birthday parties on this ship, and that one was just as dismal as the other three. I know mom and dad tried to make it feel “normal.” But it was only normal on the outside, barely. Inside, it felt all wrong.   I hope we find a landing spot soon. And I hope that whatever native cultures already there are close enough to the last one that we can set something up that feels like home. To me, at least. Maybe even pick up right where we left off, without too much effort.   Captain Yooenne says that the next compatible planet can’t be far off now, and we’ll have a place to call home for a while. But I don’t think everyone believes him. I sure don’t.   Gawd, I’m homesick.   I wasn’t born in space, and I don’t think a lot of the Elders realize how it feels. Do they even know what “home” means? How can they expect me to just give up everything I knew, and be happy with all this pretending and going-through-the-motions?   Next year I’ll turn twenty-one. If we’re still on the ship, if there's no good bars to go to, if I have to sit at a cafeteria table in the galley with my parents and their friends, again, with me and my friends wearing stupid hats and pretending like everything is fine, again...again, again, again, again...   It seems like everything we do now is just going in one big circle and there’s no point to any of it. I swear I’m going to scream my head off and jump out of an air-lock. Maybe no on can hear you scream in space, but at least I can get some of this off my chest, and if no one can hear what I say, they can’t send me in for recalibration.   What even is a “birthday” any more? Why do we still wear the stupid party hats and sing the stupid song? Why do I feel like I need to go to a bar next year? Why do we say “Happy New Year” every 365 artificial light cycles, like we’re still back home? What’s a year? An hour? Why do the Elders insist that we bother with all that?   Ok, yes, I know why, I mean, it gets drilled into us from Day One. We honor the people of the worlds we visit by keeping their traditions and ideals going when we leave. Our race doesn’t develop culture, we absorb it. They give us resources and information and fresh perspectives, and in return, through us, they get to be immortal and eternal. You know, all that stuff about “the essence of each planetary over-soul is preserved in our organic databanks and spread throughout the cosmos, for we are the propagators of thought,” and all that. Blah blah blah.   I can’t help wondering if the people whose cultures we propagate wouldn’t have rather had some of it to keep for themselves, though. I mean, look what we did to the last ones. By the time we left, they were a mess. But hey, at least their ideas go on. I guess that’s supposed to be the important thing?   Sometimes I wish they’d left me there. I don’t care if we did suck the place dry. Maybe there’s enough of that oh-so-precious archetypal essence in my own mind that I could maybe give some back and start to fix the damage we did.   How do we even know whose traditions we’re carrying? How do we know that we don’t have our own, somewhere far, far back in the beginning? We stayed for so long on this last planet that for all any of us know, we could have been forcing them to absorb our own ancient ideals instead of the other way around. Maybe we’re just trying to keep ourselves immortal and eternal, spreading our ideas to every world we inhabit, replacing their cultures with our own.   Ha! I can just picture the oldest Elders sitting around writing the words to the “Happy Birthday” song. And then deciding that it was so great that it needed to be “propagated” from one galaxy to another.   If Father Siesee knew I was having thoughts like this, he’d call me a heretic. And maybe he’s right, but maybe I can’t help it, either. I want to know why it matters. Whose religion is it, anyway? I should ask him.   Nah. For someone who’s all about absorbing others’ ideas, he’s a terrible listener.   And besides, I’m a hybrid, so they should expect me to be, like, extra confused. Mom and dad don’t like me to talk about it, but why not? If the Earthlings were so culturally rich that we stayed there for millennia, why should I be ashamed of having a little of their actual, physical essence mixed with mine? It saved my life when I was a baby. All it means is that I don’t get all of my thoughts from the Cules; some of them come from inside my own brain.   I wonder which are which?   Gosh, maybe I’ll learn all about it in college. Another traditional, time-honored milestone for all us kids here on Spaceship Earth.
/sarcasm   BBL, Deena