Reflection
You might think that growing up as I did would be something like heaven for a solitary minded girl like me. You might even think there few better places for me to grow up. A farm, with some of the largest fields in the cluster, kilometers upon kilometers of crops grown to feed the Republic. Some of the really impressive ones would be a hundred or more square kilometers. Those were the ones you had to be wary of. With the crops growing as much as three meters high, there was a district sense of claustrophobia, even when you stuck to the roads. The roads themselves could be dangerous. The giant harvester machines were known to simply roll over people who didn't get out of the way fast enough. Although fortunately, those things were pretty big, and pretty loud. You could usually hear them well before they were close enough to be a problem.
I'm rambling slightly. The fact was, losing yourself in those fields was as easy as simply stepping off the track. The greenish yellow stalks of the crops, each as thick as my fourteen year old self's upper arm would rustle and whisper as I slid between them. I loved the fields.
My parents even let me sleep out there once or twice. Onga IV had no large predators, in fact it barely had any animals bigger than a miniature slaver. I guess that's what comes of messing with the ecology of a planet on such a large scale. But people gotta eat. Anyway, I slept out among the stalks for the first time when I was nine. The red glow of the Heimatar nebula dying everything strange colors is one of my fondest memories.
I'm rambling again. I guess it's nerves. I've never described my feelings towards my home planet, or how my voluval took place before. It's not particularly special, or unusual as voluvals go, but it is very personal to me. Where I'm living now, Mikramurka on Matar in the hall with Ava, is a completely different environment. It gets to me sometimes, the constant cold.
My voluval will probably confuse most people. I was sixteen, and my father took my out to the front of the compound. Waiting for us was my older brother, Arven, sitting at the wheel of one of our fast transport vehicles. We drove for about fourty minutes, one hundred kilometers from home. I remember feeling confused, neither my father or my brother spoke a single word through the whole journey They ignored my questions. By the time we got where we were going, I was a frustrated, emotional semi-wreck. We pulled off the track somewhere I had never been before. This alone was surprising. I'd been helping on the farm since I was six and I thought I knew more or less all of it.
We got out of the car, and Arven pulled a pack out from the boot. He handed it to me, telling me there were two ways home. I could follow the road we had come down, but it was long, rough, and would be hard on my feet. It was also twisty, and not the shortest way home. Alternatively, I could walk through the field itself, in the most direct route. The ground was softer, and easier going over long distances.
He then told me I had four days to get home. If I took any longer than this, I would have failed. At the time, I still had no idea what exactly I would be failing. My father and Arven got back in the car, turned around, and drove off. It's fair to say, I did not respond particularly well to this. I screamed and shouted, cried and generally had a tantrum.
I soon realized this wasn't going to help me, and decided to go through what I had been given. The pack contained four bottles of water, more dried food than I would probably need, a light sleeping bag, and a gps. I wasn't going to starve, but I would need to watch my water intake. I also had to choose if I should try to walk the obviously defined path, or take the fields. The gps was the deciding factor here. I decided that as long as I didn't over use it and run the power down, I would be able to use it for course corrections.
So, I started walking.
((TBC))
Author
Topic: Things I have wrote. (Read 1003 times)