10 Minute Free Write: No One Asked

No one asked me how I felt about moving. My mother hopped up and down with glee when the call came from my father at work. We were leaving for a new country on a far continent. I was too young to know what any of it meant. I jumped up up down with my mother, caught in the net of her joy, a minnow. Swept in the emotion of the moment until I realized in one fast frown moving, going, means leaving, away from, I would be leaving all the I knew, my grandmother, my friends, my school, my back yard, my creek, my dog, leaving suddenly felt empty and as I landed from a hop I started to cry. The universe was opening up and swallowing me whole in its limitless emptiness. My mother stopped to hug me and reassure me that we would love it, that we would have a great life. This was my first experience of not knowing what to expect. That moment that hard wired me for all the next moments of newness -- now I always feel and fear the universe yawning and swallowing me, empty space pulls me apart in zero gravity, all that is large becomes tiny, all that is minuscule overwhelms. No one asked what I was thinking, no one asked what I felt. No one asked what I wanted or what might help me get through this. No one asked me if I needed a space ship for my journey, What I have striven to build for myself since that moment is a self-contained pod that can travel untouched through the vast reaches beyond what little I know, the small room that is my life into the hall of mirrors that always waits for me.