What is remarkable about people, I think, is that we are nomads at heart.

Even when we thought that our earth had edges to fall off we set out to map its corners, risking scurvy and shipwreck to make known the unknown.

Some say that war is our heritage, conquering, but the reality of human nature is our wandering hearts.

First we mapped the earth, braving storm-tossed seas and frigid winds and the places where maps ceased to be, and when that was done we explored the oceans, travelling to depths no person should ever see, drifting among the eerie, eyeless creatures of the black, black deep.

And when at last that was done-

When that was done we turned our gaze starward.

And I don’t mean the moon landing, that first dipping of humanity’s collective toes into the stellar waters. I mean centuries later, when we had the technology to travel out beyond the reaches of our sun and set foot on planets that even our strongest telescopes couldn’t touch from earth.

And just as the sailors of the ancient past, and the submariners of the 2100s, there are those who are born with wandering spirits, with their heels in the dirt but their eyes in the stars.

Humans haven’t changed, see?

We are still charting the unknown corridors of our world, still drawing monsters out beyond the borders, still writing ‘here there be dragons’ in all the places we haven’t yet seen.
But there will always be dragon-tamers. Always wanderers, always another sailor with an eye on the horizon and a compass for a heart. All that’s changed, really, is the size of our maps.

My last girlfriend was like that. A restless soul, born with distant stars in her veins.

She told me, once, that she was never off a ship long enough to lose her sealegs, never on solid ground long enough to get used to steady gravity.

I’ve always been the same way, always had that same starry-eyed view of space, even after all my years wrapped up in it.

Maybe we watched too much propaganda when we were young, bought too much into the Navy’s romantic vision of the stars, but either way, we fell in love watching distant worlds together.

We met on shore leave, both engineers between jobs. I was a station tech, a satellite-builder, working to link colony worlds back to earth’s internet, helping all those distant voices find their way home.

She was a ship doctor, engine grease always under her nails, she was tall and dark and clever-eyed,  happiest with an engine humming through the soles of her shoes and her hands wrapped deep in the cables of a ship’s heart.

That shore leave- we were restless, antsy for the stars together, and sharing that longing with someone made it bearable.

All our dates were spent staring up at the night sky, or looking through telescopes, mooning after the worlds we saw on-duty.

(“What else do you think is out there?” I’d once asked her, and she’d looked at me with stars in her eyes and said, “Anything you can imagine.”
And who could not fall in love with that?)

But we were the both of us cheating on the other. Her first and greatest love was space, and mine was too, and when our shore leave ended we did not hesitate to part.

She left first, off to heal ships in the distant corners of the solar system (We were past war, for the most part, traded goods with the other races of the galaxy, rather than bullets, but space can be cruel, sometimes, and ships will always need repairing).

She kissed me goodbye in her engineer’s uniform, grease already on her hands, and said “We’ll keep in touch.”

I’m sure she meant it, too, but my job took me to worlds not yet hooked up to satellite. The only contact we had with the outside word were ships that came bi-monthly, and letters were romantic, for a while, but two weeks is a long time to go without talking with your girlfriend, so eventually, the letters stopped coming.

I confess I didn’t really mind. I was one of only two hundred people selected to prepare this world for colonization- biologists and engineers and farmers and photographers, all of us discovering the planet together.

I spent every day in the field breathing  hot, green air that few humans had ever breathed. Every hour that I wasn’t asleep I was out in the forests, running cables and building receivers and being bitten by alien bugs. And every night I fell into bed with aching shoulders and electrical burns and kid-at-Christmas excitement to wake up and start working again.

Every week we found a new animal, a new landmark, a new plant, we were explorers and cartographers and hopeless romantics, and the thrill of seeing something no one in the universe had yet seen was enough to drive everything else away.

We were caught up in it, I think, the blood-rush of adventure, that thrill of scratching the human itch to explore.So it was easy to forget about a distant girl, out healing ships beyond our constellations.

Three years passed like that, a whirlwind of discovery and activity. But the first settlers were starting to arrive, and the satellites were up there blinking in the sky, and I had no reason to be on the planet any longer.

I was just drumming my fingers waiting for a boat to take me off-world, and maybe I was restless, or lonely, or bored, but I started thinking, again. About her. About how there was no excuse not to write, anymore.

So, what does a human do, when saying something they’re not sure they want heard?

They send out a message in a bottle. A letter adrift in space, and if it is found then it is found, and if it is not, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

Of course, I didn’t send out a literal message in a bottle- rather, I did the modern equivalent. I posted a ‘missed connections’ ad online:

Looking for Graeme? - w4m
I never liked the way things ended with us... I want to have one last date, no strings attached. If you feel the same, send me an email.

And- somehow- she found the ad. Maybe she was restless and lonely too, I don’t know. All I know is that she sent me an email-

Gia Graeme
to me
Jamie,
Guess they finally got internet on that rock of yours.
I’d love to go for a coffee some time. When’s your shore leave?
-G. Graeme

So, when I took the next ship off-world, she was waiting for me on earth.

She looked the same, mostly. Hair tied back messy, calloused fingers, old spark-scars trailing up her forearms.

“Hi,” she said, and I smiled, and after no time at all it was just like it used to be.

There were pauses in conversation, sometimes, where neither of us knew quite what to say, and always in the air between us hung the letters we never sent, but-

But she was still beautiful, and funny, and brilliant, and she said she saw the same in me, and she still kissed me like she used to, warm and fierce and smelling of copper, and I fell in love all over again.

But we were the both of us cheating, still, still in love with the stars after all these years, and when her shore leave ended I took a shuttle off-planet with her to the space station, where the Navy’s based, a sort of intergalactic airport.

I wanted to send her off, I guess, a proper goodbye this time, not just a chaste kiss and a promise we couldn’t keep.
I stumbled over as soon as we made it to the station, and she caught my arm with a laugh. “Got used to natural gravity, huh dirtheel?”

I laughed too, because I had, because it’d been too long since I’d been out among the stars, because I was in love.

Then there was- a pause. A lull in conversation, like when we were fresh-reunited and still not quite sure what to say.

“You know,” She said, after a long time. “I’m going on a diplomatic mission, this time. Meet some aliens, establish a station in allied space.”

She bit her lip. “That kind of mission- we could always use another engineer. There’d be new plants, new bugs, plenty of rickety old space station to repair. All that crap you like.”

She paused, again, ran a hand through her hair. “And there’s space for you, if you want to come.”

I thought about the six months of shore leave I still had left, the family I had yet to visit, my apartment sitting empty and gathering dust.

And I didn’t hesitate. “When do we leave?”