Life on Mars

WHEN HE WAS LITTLE, my dad wanted to be an astronaut. When I was little, I would lean back on the tire swing, spinning round and round and think, This is what flying feels like.

My dad is not an astronaut. But I could be. If I wasn’t afraid of the dark, of nothingness, of being trapped. If I could push all that aside and live through shooting off into space.

In 2011, two days after Thanksgiving, NASA sent the Curiosity Rover to Mars. I was in third grade at the time, learning my times tables.

On average, Mars is about 140 million miles from Earth.

On average, I walk 3.2 miles a day, which is roughly four times the distance from my mom’s house to my dad’s house. If I were to live somewhere perfectly in the middle, I would spend my nights at Panola Street Cafe.

When I walk from one house to the other, I spend a lot of time staring off into space. Maybe that’s why I want to go there so bad, go away so bad.

Or maybe it’s because when you’re millions and millions of miles from Earth, the distance between your mom’s house and your dad’s house gets so scrunched together that if you threw a dart, they’d both get pinned, along with Panola Street Cafe, right in the middle.

In 2013, roughly 140 million miles away, Curiosity hummed “Happy Birthday” to the vast, empty Mars one year after its touchdown on the planet. People called it lonely. In 2013, I turned eleven and my birthday was spent bouncing from house to house. It was my first birthday with my parents divorced, and they hadn’t quite drawn out the schedule right. I spent the night at a friend’s house.

I don’t think it would be that bad on Mars, 140 million miles from both my houses and my parents and everything in between. After nine days out there though, my muscles would lose all strength and my ears would pop under the pressure. If I ever came back, it would take months to recover. Still, I don’t think it would be that bad on Mars.