A World Away

Dear Anna,

It's been eleven years since I left. I don't know if you even remember me anymore. We were best friends back on Earth. We used to do everything together: laugh obnoxiously in the movie theatre, shove our faces with chocolate when your parents weren't looking, even pass secret notes in class. That was all before the men in the white uniforms came. You remember them? We used to call them the "Whiteshirts" or "Whites" or something. They came and took me away from you. I never said why, I remember that much. I never told you why they took me away, or why I didn't say goodbye. But it's been eleven years, and I think you should know.

You see, when those men knocked on your door that day, I knew who they were. Or, at least, I thought I knew. I thought they were there to take me back to the place I'd lived before. Remember all those years ago, when your mom signed a bunch of papers and then suddenly I got to live with you? Well, it turns out she had adopted me. I was lonely, before you, and I guess she saw that. So when the "Whiteshirts" started banging on doors and taking kids away, I thought I knew exactly what was going on.

But instead of taking me back into the cold clutches of that terrible group home I will never miss, they whisked me off to an aircraft facility and shoved me on to a bumpy old spaceship with a bunch of other orphans. Apparently we were the crew for a new space mission, except that this one wasn't ever going to land. The world was overpopulated, and no one would miss a few homeless kids.

The group of us stayed up in the sky, orbiting Earth for almost eleven years on that "Space Mission." Then finally, the week after we watched nuclear missiles sail across the world, enveloping whole countries in a cloud of noxious gas, the spaceship got a call. The war was over, NASA said, but the population had been horribly diminished. We were needed.

So yeah, now I'm barreling towards Earth scribbling of a piece of notepad to distract myself from the fact that you might not care about me anymore. That you might not be alive to care about me. It's not working too well.

But I guess I've kind of been avoiding the point, huh? Well, here goes: I'm scared, and I miss you. I miss you like hell, and I know that even as this ship gets closer and closer to Earth I know you won't remember the little girl who always hung around you; the little brown-haired midget whose presence your mother probably never dared explain. I know that no matter how hard I try to convince myself to send this letter, it will sit in a dusty attic, squeezed between boxes of old photos and movie tickets, for eternity.

-Dawn Lam