"Tsundoku"
Oct. 23rd, 2018 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonreirI’m fifteen minutes from takeoff when anxiety kicks in. I’m strapped into the plush seat, I’ve taken the anti-nausea pills I’ve been recommended, and I’m as ready as I’m going to be -- but part of my brain is screaming at me to get off the ship and go home right now.
“Nervous?” asks the woman sitting across from me.
“Um.” I wonder what to say to her. It’s not nerves, exactly, but I don’t know how much I want to tell a stranger. “Sorta.”
She smiles at me sympathetically. She’s older -- close to my mom in age, if I had to guess, with dyed red hair cut into a chin-length bob and brown eyes surrounded with soft lines. Definitely one of the Explorers -- there are patches on her jacket that indicate her role and rank. I wonder what she’s doing on a commercial flight, if it was faster than an official flight out.
“The Luminary flights are nice. Much nicer than anything the Explorers will put you in,” she says, reading my mind. “I get sick every time I have to take one of those system-hoppers they still use. Worth it to pay a little more and not arrive feeling like a wrung-out sponge.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve heard. I’ve got anti-nausea tablets, I’m not too worried about it.”
“Headed to your first posting?” she hazards a guess. “Worried about leaving someone behind?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“You’ll be able to talk to them, wherever you’re going,” she says, and reaches across the aisle to pat my leg. “I’m able to keep up with my daughter and her husband in Massachusetts, even when I’m posted to Ceres, and that’s almost as far out as you can get.”
I think of Nonna, how to explain the entire story, why I’m not worried about communication so much as what comes next.
“Thanks,” I finally settle on. “That’s really reassuring.”
She frowns a little, like she doesn’t believe me, but she doesn’t ask any more questions, either.
Both my parents were in the New Frontier Explorers. I probably would have been an Explorers brat -- traveling from place to place with my parents -- except when they finally got an off-planet posting, after I turned four, I couldn’t pass the necessary antigrav tests. The base doctor recommended that my parents keep me planetside -- ground their own dreams to take care of me, instead.
They tried. After they found out that I had to stay on Earth, they found a cheap apartment to rent, near the base, and started talking about the future and what they had to do.
They tried to stay, and I think they even wanted to, for my sake -- but Mom had a telescope on the apartment balcony, and she spent all her time looking out it, up at the stars.
They tried to stay, but -- Dad watched the rocket launches from across the Bay at twilight each evening.
They hid it from each other, but after three months of living in that apartment, Dad broke down and called his mom, my Nonna, for advice.
“For God’s sake, Kevin,” she said, over the phone. “How long is a posting? Six months? I’ll take care of the baby; you and Hillary get yourselves a new assignment.”
Mom was reluctant, but when she saw how happy I was with Nonna, she gave in. They got another posting, this time to Ceres. They sold all the furniture from the apartment, moved me in with Nonna, and promised to come back in six months. Six months on, six months off. That’s the way the Explorers worked. In the meantime, Nonna would take care of me.
This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I never doubted that they loved me. I knew they did. We talked via videochat every night. They provided well for me and for Nonna, slipping her money every time they saw her, insisting that she spend it on me if she didn’t want to spend it on herself.
I didn’t blame them for wanting to advance their careers. As a little kid, I was too preoccupied with my own life, my own concerns -- learning to read, making friends, learning my spelling words and doing my homework.
I saw my parents every summer. They’d arrive in July and leave in January, staying through Christmas and leaving around New Year’s Day. As I got older, it occurred to me that I should have been bothered, maybe, that I didn’t have a better relationship with them, but I had Nonna. It was a non-standard arrangement, but I was happy, mostly.
Nonna taught me to read, long before I started school. The complex she lived in was mostly full of older people. There wasn’t a playground, or anywhere safe for me to go outside, and there weren’t any other kids my age in the building. I had toys, but without playmates, they weren’t much fun. Books were my solace, my friends. There was a good library in town, and I dominated their summer reading program. There was a good thrift store, too, where I could find books two for a dollar, and I’d beg Nonna to take me with her whenever she went.
“Fine,” she always said. Books piled up.
She’d threaten, sometimes, to make me donate them to the thrift store, but I’d howl at her every time she brought it up.
“I haven’t read that one yet!”
Nonna got frustrated, I think, at how stubborn I could be -- re-reading the same books over and over again while ignoring the ones I’d just purchased. She never pushed, though. While she’d occasionally threaten to make me “sort through” and “get rid of some”, she didn’t force me to.
“We have enough room on the shelves,” she said. “Hell. What’s a few books, anyway?”
Even after I made friends, became somewhat popular in school, I kept reading. I played soccer and joined the youth choir, and read on public transit there and back. On long car trips up to Sacramento to visit family, I’d read, too, even if it made me violently ill.
“Sweetheart,” Nonna said, every time. “You wouldn’t get so sick if you didn’t read in the car.”
I kept reading anyway.
Ceres led to another mission to Mars, and then one out to Europa, to help improve living conditions on the base there. My parents kept calling me every night, no matter where they were, and Nonna kept taking care of me.
We continued on like this for years.
Shortly before my 17th birthday, Nonna’s health started to decline.
It started small. She had a hard time keeping her balance.
“Inner ear stuff,” she grimaced, whenever I’d help her up from a spill. “Never had good balance.”
Eventually, it became difficulty walking. I helped her when I could, but that wasn’t often. She was stubborn and didn’t want to admit that there was anything wrong.
“Hell,” she often grumbled, after climbing the stairs to her apartment. “They’re going to have to put me in an old folks’ home.”
I looked at her and didn’t say anything.
I told Dad what was happening, during one of the nightly videochats. It was Monday. I’d just gotten home from soccer practice. Nonna wasn’t home yet -- Mondays she spent at the community center.
“Her health is going,” I told Dad, bluntly. “I know she’s getting old, but she’s having a hard time moving around the apartment now. I think she needs to move into senior living.”
I didn’t say, what are we going to do with me, because I didn’t want to think about what the answer was.
“We’ll be getting our next assignment soon,” said Dad faintly. “We can request a posting on Earth…”
“Talk with Mom,” I said. “Talk with Nonna. Figure out what she wants to do.”
Dad hesitated. “All right,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
I turned 17 that June. Mom and Dad came down on leave three weeks later. Nonna and I picked them up at the base, driving over in her beater Toyota sedan, the one she kept joking she was going to give me for my first car -- “because, darling, if you wrecked it, who would be able to tell?”
Dad was silent on the way home. Mom was full of stories -- what the flight back had been like, what their plans were while they were home. I stared out at the Bay and brooded, listening to her. I knew what was going to come next.
“I’ve got the bed in the extra room made up,” I told them, when we pulled up in the complex parking lot. I struggled to think of an excuse, something that would get me out of the house for a while so they could talk about the future, about what was going to come next. “I, um…”
Dad handed me a few bills. “Can you go to the ice cream place over by the taqueria and get a gallon of the chocolate chunk your mom loves?”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved. “I can do that.”
When I came back, after I put the ice cream in the freezer, they told me that Nonna was moving into a senior living complex, and I was coming with them to Mars in September.
“If you pass the anti-grav tests,” said Mom. “School starts in September. We’ll stay on Mars for a year to let you finish high school, and then you can apply to college and we’ll resume our work in the outer reaches of the solar system.”
They told me what to expect. I was allowed 25 kilos of stuff, all of which had to fit into a one cubic meter container. I’d have to get rid of everything: all of my books, all personal mementos, everything except my clothes.
I wanted to say something, anything, that would convey how I felt without sounding overdramatic, making it sound like I cared more about myself than I did about Nonna.
I couldn’t think of anything.
“Okay,” I said. “And if I don’t pass the tests?”
Dad looked pained. “If you don’t pass,” he said, “we’ll figure something out.”
I passed them.
Nonna helped me get rid of everything. Mom offered to help, as did Dad, but I didn’t want them to. I knew it wasn’t their fault, that this had to happen eventually, and at least we were compromising -- I’d get to finish my education, Nonna’s health wouldn’t worsen -- but it was still a blow.
“Amber,” said Nonna, helping me sort what to donate to where. “Sweetheart. I can keep some of these, you know.”
She held up a battered, much-loved copy of Anne of Green Gables.
“This one, for instance,” she said. “Do you remember the book report you did, for Mrs. Smith’s class in fourth grade?”
“Yeah,” I said. I chucked it into the thrift store pile.
“Ouch,” said Nonna. “Poor Anne.”
She set it aside, into her own pile of things.
“You’ll be back in a year,” she said, wisely. “You might want it then.”
As I sorted books, she wrote down titles and authors. “So you’ll know what you have to replace,” she said, when I asked. “So you’ll know what to look for in thrift stores.”
I tried not to cry.
September came sooner than I wanted.
Mom and Dad left for Mars two weeks before I did, to set up the new apartment and start their jobs.
I stayed behind, wanting to take as much time as I could to say goodbye to my childhood.
The night before I was due to ship out, I took the last load of books to the library and said goodbye to all my old haunts.
“You’ll be back in a year,” said Nonna, as I buckled up after dropping off the last load of books.
“I know,” I said. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared out the window. “If I come back here. If I get into school here.”
“Darling,” said Nonna. “Never say never.”
Nonna drove me to the luminal station the next afternoon, helped me get checked in and find where I was supposed to go. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t mind the help.
“I’ll see you in a year,” she said, as she hugged me. “I’ll have to show you my new place.”
I teared up and hugged her back hard.
“Hello, passengers,” the captain’s voice comes smoothly over the PA system. “I’m pleased to report that we are cleared for takeoff. There will be a four-hour mandatory seatbelt period, and then you will be free to move around the ship. We’re expecting a three-day journey to Elysium. If you have questions about your sleeping arrangements or meal tickets, please don’t hesitate to ask a Luminary crew member. Until then, prepare for takeoff, and I hope you enjoy your voyage with us.”
“Are you ready?” asks the woman across the aisle from me.
I manage a nod.
“It helps if you distract yourself,” she says, as the engines kick on and I hear their quiet hum. “Did you bring anything to read?”
“I have a tablet,” I say, quietly. “My grandmother gave it to me; I think it’s got something loaded on it.”
Nonna had pressed it into my hand just before boarding. “Reading material,” she said, and I tried not to cry. “It’s not the same as a book, sweetheart, but it’ll do, I think.”
Remembering it, I pull it out of my bag, and open the ereader app.
I’m expecting one or two books, something long enough to keep me occupied for the entirety of the flight.
Instead, I find close to a thousand.
“What?” I say, surprised.
There’s something else, too: “A note from your Nonna”. I tap the icon to load it.
Dear Amber, it starts. I know you’re wondering what this is…
I read it, as we take off into the cool blue of the early evening sky.
I couldn’t let you go off and leave everything behind. I made a list of all your books, and I had one of the ladies at the local bookstore help me find e-copies of all of them. I’ve put them on here, so that even though you are far away from home, you’ll still have your friends.
Remember, sweetheart -- it’s only a year. You’ll be home before you know it, and I’ll be waiting to make you dinner when you can’t stand more of that awful dorm food.
Love,
Nonna
I stare at the full list of books in disbelief. Everything I’d read, and some things I’d never gotten around to reading, it’s my full book collection, all loaded onto a new tablet.
I switch out of the app and send Nonna a message.
“THANK YOU!!!” I type. “I’ll give you a videocall as soon as I land in Elysium. I love you!!”
“Love you too,” Nonna quickly types back. “Bon voyage.”
A year, I think, reading it. I can manage a year.
“Nervous?” asks the woman sitting across from me.
“Um.” I wonder what to say to her. It’s not nerves, exactly, but I don’t know how much I want to tell a stranger. “Sorta.”
She smiles at me sympathetically. She’s older -- close to my mom in age, if I had to guess, with dyed red hair cut into a chin-length bob and brown eyes surrounded with soft lines. Definitely one of the Explorers -- there are patches on her jacket that indicate her role and rank. I wonder what she’s doing on a commercial flight, if it was faster than an official flight out.
“The Luminary flights are nice. Much nicer than anything the Explorers will put you in,” she says, reading my mind. “I get sick every time I have to take one of those system-hoppers they still use. Worth it to pay a little more and not arrive feeling like a wrung-out sponge.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve heard. I’ve got anti-nausea tablets, I’m not too worried about it.”
“Headed to your first posting?” she hazards a guess. “Worried about leaving someone behind?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“You’ll be able to talk to them, wherever you’re going,” she says, and reaches across the aisle to pat my leg. “I’m able to keep up with my daughter and her husband in Massachusetts, even when I’m posted to Ceres, and that’s almost as far out as you can get.”
I think of Nonna, how to explain the entire story, why I’m not worried about communication so much as what comes next.
“Thanks,” I finally settle on. “That’s really reassuring.”
She frowns a little, like she doesn’t believe me, but she doesn’t ask any more questions, either.
Both my parents were in the New Frontier Explorers. I probably would have been an Explorers brat -- traveling from place to place with my parents -- except when they finally got an off-planet posting, after I turned four, I couldn’t pass the necessary antigrav tests. The base doctor recommended that my parents keep me planetside -- ground their own dreams to take care of me, instead.
They tried. After they found out that I had to stay on Earth, they found a cheap apartment to rent, near the base, and started talking about the future and what they had to do.
They tried to stay, and I think they even wanted to, for my sake -- but Mom had a telescope on the apartment balcony, and she spent all her time looking out it, up at the stars.
They tried to stay, but -- Dad watched the rocket launches from across the Bay at twilight each evening.
They hid it from each other, but after three months of living in that apartment, Dad broke down and called his mom, my Nonna, for advice.
“For God’s sake, Kevin,” she said, over the phone. “How long is a posting? Six months? I’ll take care of the baby; you and Hillary get yourselves a new assignment.”
Mom was reluctant, but when she saw how happy I was with Nonna, she gave in. They got another posting, this time to Ceres. They sold all the furniture from the apartment, moved me in with Nonna, and promised to come back in six months. Six months on, six months off. That’s the way the Explorers worked. In the meantime, Nonna would take care of me.
This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I never doubted that they loved me. I knew they did. We talked via videochat every night. They provided well for me and for Nonna, slipping her money every time they saw her, insisting that she spend it on me if she didn’t want to spend it on herself.
I didn’t blame them for wanting to advance their careers. As a little kid, I was too preoccupied with my own life, my own concerns -- learning to read, making friends, learning my spelling words and doing my homework.
I saw my parents every summer. They’d arrive in July and leave in January, staying through Christmas and leaving around New Year’s Day. As I got older, it occurred to me that I should have been bothered, maybe, that I didn’t have a better relationship with them, but I had Nonna. It was a non-standard arrangement, but I was happy, mostly.
Nonna taught me to read, long before I started school. The complex she lived in was mostly full of older people. There wasn’t a playground, or anywhere safe for me to go outside, and there weren’t any other kids my age in the building. I had toys, but without playmates, they weren’t much fun. Books were my solace, my friends. There was a good library in town, and I dominated their summer reading program. There was a good thrift store, too, where I could find books two for a dollar, and I’d beg Nonna to take me with her whenever she went.
“Fine,” she always said. Books piled up.
She’d threaten, sometimes, to make me donate them to the thrift store, but I’d howl at her every time she brought it up.
“I haven’t read that one yet!”
Nonna got frustrated, I think, at how stubborn I could be -- re-reading the same books over and over again while ignoring the ones I’d just purchased. She never pushed, though. While she’d occasionally threaten to make me “sort through” and “get rid of some”, she didn’t force me to.
“We have enough room on the shelves,” she said. “Hell. What’s a few books, anyway?”
Even after I made friends, became somewhat popular in school, I kept reading. I played soccer and joined the youth choir, and read on public transit there and back. On long car trips up to Sacramento to visit family, I’d read, too, even if it made me violently ill.
“Sweetheart,” Nonna said, every time. “You wouldn’t get so sick if you didn’t read in the car.”
I kept reading anyway.
Ceres led to another mission to Mars, and then one out to Europa, to help improve living conditions on the base there. My parents kept calling me every night, no matter where they were, and Nonna kept taking care of me.
We continued on like this for years.
Shortly before my 17th birthday, Nonna’s health started to decline.
It started small. She had a hard time keeping her balance.
“Inner ear stuff,” she grimaced, whenever I’d help her up from a spill. “Never had good balance.”
Eventually, it became difficulty walking. I helped her when I could, but that wasn’t often. She was stubborn and didn’t want to admit that there was anything wrong.
“Hell,” she often grumbled, after climbing the stairs to her apartment. “They’re going to have to put me in an old folks’ home.”
I looked at her and didn’t say anything.
I told Dad what was happening, during one of the nightly videochats. It was Monday. I’d just gotten home from soccer practice. Nonna wasn’t home yet -- Mondays she spent at the community center.
“Her health is going,” I told Dad, bluntly. “I know she’s getting old, but she’s having a hard time moving around the apartment now. I think she needs to move into senior living.”
I didn’t say, what are we going to do with me, because I didn’t want to think about what the answer was.
“We’ll be getting our next assignment soon,” said Dad faintly. “We can request a posting on Earth…”
“Talk with Mom,” I said. “Talk with Nonna. Figure out what she wants to do.”
Dad hesitated. “All right,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
I turned 17 that June. Mom and Dad came down on leave three weeks later. Nonna and I picked them up at the base, driving over in her beater Toyota sedan, the one she kept joking she was going to give me for my first car -- “because, darling, if you wrecked it, who would be able to tell?”
Dad was silent on the way home. Mom was full of stories -- what the flight back had been like, what their plans were while they were home. I stared out at the Bay and brooded, listening to her. I knew what was going to come next.
“I’ve got the bed in the extra room made up,” I told them, when we pulled up in the complex parking lot. I struggled to think of an excuse, something that would get me out of the house for a while so they could talk about the future, about what was going to come next. “I, um…”
Dad handed me a few bills. “Can you go to the ice cream place over by the taqueria and get a gallon of the chocolate chunk your mom loves?”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved. “I can do that.”
When I came back, after I put the ice cream in the freezer, they told me that Nonna was moving into a senior living complex, and I was coming with them to Mars in September.
“If you pass the anti-grav tests,” said Mom. “School starts in September. We’ll stay on Mars for a year to let you finish high school, and then you can apply to college and we’ll resume our work in the outer reaches of the solar system.”
They told me what to expect. I was allowed 25 kilos of stuff, all of which had to fit into a one cubic meter container. I’d have to get rid of everything: all of my books, all personal mementos, everything except my clothes.
I wanted to say something, anything, that would convey how I felt without sounding overdramatic, making it sound like I cared more about myself than I did about Nonna.
I couldn’t think of anything.
“Okay,” I said. “And if I don’t pass the tests?”
Dad looked pained. “If you don’t pass,” he said, “we’ll figure something out.”
I passed them.
Nonna helped me get rid of everything. Mom offered to help, as did Dad, but I didn’t want them to. I knew it wasn’t their fault, that this had to happen eventually, and at least we were compromising -- I’d get to finish my education, Nonna’s health wouldn’t worsen -- but it was still a blow.
“Amber,” said Nonna, helping me sort what to donate to where. “Sweetheart. I can keep some of these, you know.”
She held up a battered, much-loved copy of Anne of Green Gables.
“This one, for instance,” she said. “Do you remember the book report you did, for Mrs. Smith’s class in fourth grade?”
“Yeah,” I said. I chucked it into the thrift store pile.
“Ouch,” said Nonna. “Poor Anne.”
She set it aside, into her own pile of things.
“You’ll be back in a year,” she said, wisely. “You might want it then.”
As I sorted books, she wrote down titles and authors. “So you’ll know what you have to replace,” she said, when I asked. “So you’ll know what to look for in thrift stores.”
I tried not to cry.
September came sooner than I wanted.
Mom and Dad left for Mars two weeks before I did, to set up the new apartment and start their jobs.
I stayed behind, wanting to take as much time as I could to say goodbye to my childhood.
The night before I was due to ship out, I took the last load of books to the library and said goodbye to all my old haunts.
“You’ll be back in a year,” said Nonna, as I buckled up after dropping off the last load of books.
“I know,” I said. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared out the window. “If I come back here. If I get into school here.”
“Darling,” said Nonna. “Never say never.”
Nonna drove me to the luminal station the next afternoon, helped me get checked in and find where I was supposed to go. I could have done it myself, but I didn’t mind the help.
“I’ll see you in a year,” she said, as she hugged me. “I’ll have to show you my new place.”
I teared up and hugged her back hard.
“Hello, passengers,” the captain’s voice comes smoothly over the PA system. “I’m pleased to report that we are cleared for takeoff. There will be a four-hour mandatory seatbelt period, and then you will be free to move around the ship. We’re expecting a three-day journey to Elysium. If you have questions about your sleeping arrangements or meal tickets, please don’t hesitate to ask a Luminary crew member. Until then, prepare for takeoff, and I hope you enjoy your voyage with us.”
“Are you ready?” asks the woman across the aisle from me.
I manage a nod.
“It helps if you distract yourself,” she says, as the engines kick on and I hear their quiet hum. “Did you bring anything to read?”
“I have a tablet,” I say, quietly. “My grandmother gave it to me; I think it’s got something loaded on it.”
Nonna had pressed it into my hand just before boarding. “Reading material,” she said, and I tried not to cry. “It’s not the same as a book, sweetheart, but it’ll do, I think.”
Remembering it, I pull it out of my bag, and open the ereader app.
I’m expecting one or two books, something long enough to keep me occupied for the entirety of the flight.
Instead, I find close to a thousand.
“What?” I say, surprised.
There’s something else, too: “A note from your Nonna”. I tap the icon to load it.
Dear Amber, it starts. I know you’re wondering what this is…
I read it, as we take off into the cool blue of the early evening sky.
I couldn’t let you go off and leave everything behind. I made a list of all your books, and I had one of the ladies at the local bookstore help me find e-copies of all of them. I’ve put them on here, so that even though you are far away from home, you’ll still have your friends.
Remember, sweetheart -- it’s only a year. You’ll be home before you know it, and I’ll be waiting to make you dinner when you can’t stand more of that awful dorm food.
Love,
Nonna
I stare at the full list of books in disbelief. Everything I’d read, and some things I’d never gotten around to reading, it’s my full book collection, all loaded onto a new tablet.
I switch out of the app and send Nonna a message.
“THANK YOU!!!” I type. “I’ll give you a videocall as soon as I land in Elysium. I love you!!”
“Love you too,” Nonna quickly types back. “Bon voyage.”
A year, I think, reading it. I can manage a year.
