Flauraan, Abigail is 24, Sophie is 26
How does it feel? How does it feel? Having Sophie Lestari in your life means your life is one of chaos, each day a new adventure. She has been many things; a researcher, an office worker, a mech builder, a planet saver, a traumatised orphan, a carefree explorer, an intergalactic peacemaker, a parent, a friend, a danger. And she slips between these roles effortlessly, and can't truly leave any of them because she always gets sucked back in. It's in her nature. She's vibrant and caring and thoughtless and wickedly intelligent.
Some days you wake up to her curled up in a ball beside you and you can't help but stare to see her so childlike, and you wish she could stay like this forever, safe and happy. Some days you reach over and the bed is empty and then you remember that she is lightyears away, helping Mickey with Zara and the girls, or assessing a new site for a refugee camp, or blasting holes in an asteroid, and you feel this intense longing to be where she is.
And of course sometimes I go days and weeks without seeing her, and sometimes I don't think or worry about her at all. The mind is a funny thing like that. When the distance between you and someone you love becomes so huge as to be insurmountable it's almost as if they never existed in the first place. I'll work and study and advise and help my family in the fields and will convince myself that every day is like this and that I don't need anything else and I am happy.
Sometimes I am happy when Sophie is gone, but I am always happy when she reappears.
she belongs out there in the universe in a way I never will. It always feels to me like I am on perpetual vacation, like I can't properly think, like I'm not quite real unless I can climb the hill near my house and gaze at the woods that have bounded me my whole life. My deepest fear is that Sophie will one day realise how small I am, how boxed in and simple is my life, and she will find it impossible to go on being restrained by my pitiful existence. Not that I find it pitiful. But I know I can't be part of the more and everything that she flits between day to day. She is the biggest and brightest part of my universe, yet I am destined to always be one of all the stars in her wandering.
I do believe she loves me, how could I not? There's no other explanation really, for the fact that she always returns to Flauraan, spends any of her precious days in my house next to me, puts up with me at all. I know, logically, that this feeling is simply my insecurities at play.
Still, I am completely blindsided when Sophie bursts into the room, grips my hands and earnestly implores me, “Let’s get married!”
To be continued...