Sitting here staring into the stars, remembering how little I’d thought of traveling from one planet to another –one system to another– and now I was here, stuck dirtside forever… on purpose. Not that it was really forever. The colonist contract was only ten years, so if I really wanted to I could turn around and leave then, but who leaves after ten years in the mud?

The universe is evolving faster than it’s expanding, thanks to relativity. Ships that eat a year of your life eat fifty years of everyone else’s and think of everything the world could do in fifty years. It’s a cosmic joke that we’re constantly overtaking ourselves, only we rarely do. Space colonization, exploration, it’s a fad that comes and goes. Humanity always reaching for the stars, but only if it’s in fashion at the moment.

So the core grows up and we grow out, and it’s not even close to the place I left a year ago. But that’s fine by me. Time to put a little ‘time’ back into my life and take the slow path for a while.

Never did mind dirt anyways.