Aim To Engage 2019

Science Fiction Pormpt- Coming Home

As Earth comes into view my heart starts racing, I'm finally going back home, everyone else on my mission died but I was able to survive on what little I had left of our supplies.

I am ecstatic, I get to see my wife again, and our kid, God. How old would she be now? I lost track of how many Earth years had gone by a while ago.

I enter Earth's atmosphere. God I can't wait to breath air without a helmet on.

I land in the water.

I come onto land. Crowds of people surround me cheering and smiling. I look for my wife.

A woman comes running up to me.

"Dad!" I look down at her, I don't know who this woman is, she must be, at least my age, maybe even a bit older. She had auburn hair and... my blue eyes.

"Um, my name is Jocelyn, I'm your daughter, according to what mom said. The last time you saw me was when I was eight. I'm twenty eight now!" The woman was younger than me. I looked down at her and she smiled up at me.

People were still cheering around us as she led me to a sleek black thing that looked kind of like what the new car was going to look like before I left.

We were driving down the roads and huge build boards flashed in and out of view. As we passed through the downtown area bright colorful lights flashed and blinked.

I turned toward the young woman who was my daughter.

"What happened to my wife? Where is she?" My daughter's face that previously had held happiness now dropped into despair.

"She, uh, she died, three weeks ago. She got a really bad cancer, she was in the hospital for two years, her last wish was to see you again. She, she died before she could."

I turned away from my daughter, I looked at my reflection in the window, my face held despair, and my eyes were completely devoid of any other emotion. Anything that passes outside went by completely unnoticed to me as my thoughts dove into darkness.

My world had been turned upside down, the only familiar thing was my own reflection, but even that seemed to have changed as I looked at myself and examined the scars that littered my body.

I read the newspaper while my daughter talks about her schooling, she was a computer technician, except the computers were the size of my hand now.

The headline was about me.

"Local man comes home from space mission after twenty years!"

Everything was changed, technology, advertisements, my daughter, my... wife, my world. Everything is unfamiliar and different. Twenty years changed the world and I missed it and I might never be able to catch up.

This world that I see now is less familiar than the deep void of space that I had only seen a fraction of.

I long for something, anything familiar.