While the Stars are our Home

the beginning

Hi!

I don't really know how to start this off really, I'm not much of a storyteller, but thanks for asking about my story anyway!

Let's, see, oh! I'll start with the weather.

No, not just any weather, let me explain. In the year 2023, wow that was so long ago now, the earth began to become uninhabitable.

In my opinion, we as a human race had been treating the earth so badly for so long that it had enough of us and gotten rid of us. But if you listen to the scientists, it was a different story of course, and you can believe what you want, it's a free.... Well, it's not much of a country anymore, is it?

Back to the story, the weather patterns began to escalate, and it got really bad, hurricanes every other week, volcanos erupting in random places with no warning, and even earthquakes in areas that had never had them before.

We all had to do something, people were dying off so quickly, my parents were some of the first. They had gone on a trip to a cabin in some mountains and there was a freak mudslide that took out several miles of country.

Sometimes I still think about them, especially now that I have reached the age they were when they died.

I like to think that they had good lives, and they got to see me grow up most of the way. My biggest regret is that they never got to see my husband and my own child, but some things can't be helped, can they?

Whoops, I'm getting ahead of myself, lets's go back to the weather patterns.

The weather and natural disasters continued to get worse and worse, and people ended up beginning to migrate to places where things were not as bad, and by a year later, the earth was almost unrecognizable.

Modern infrastructure was collapsing all across the planet and the governments were quickly falling apart.

Nobody had answers for us, and many systems broke down, leaving us in many places without electricity and running water.

I was lucky! I lived in the Arizona desert, we didn't have many issues, besides the occasional dust storm or thunderstorm, which did get pretty bad and sometimes lasted several days.

But our area was then used as a refugee area, it was not good in the summers, which were almost unlivable in the heat of the desert.

I was a preschool teacher before everything went to hell, and afterward, I was able to get involved with the charities and organizations that were helping the refugees arriving from all across the country.

That was where I met him.

The first time I saw him was not that long after everything went crazy, I remember he still had pink hair and it stood out to me as the nurses helped him off the medical truck.

He had arrived with a group of injured military personnel and soldiers, but he clearly wasn't one of them with their close-cropped severe haircuts.

He had been covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes, and his arms were both wrapped in thick layers of gauze. I learned later from a nurse friend of mine that he was a pilot for NASA and had been injured doing some kind of test flights in a new type of plane.

But as he stepped off the truck his eyes met mine for a split second and I swore they held all of the secrets of the universe. I could tell despite his injuries that he was a very attractive man and at that moment I froze. Nobody like him had ever come across my path in Arizona and it was intimidating, to say the least.

Well, I didn't really think I would see him again after that day. I didn't work in the hospitals, I can't stomach wounds, and I didn't let many people get too close to me at the time.