<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Love is a world itself. Shams Tabrizi<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Once the colonists were completely situated and provisioned, our job was done and we began the long trip toward Earth, toward what most of the crew considered \u2018home\u2019.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t at all sure I still considered Earth home, myself.<\/p>\n While everyone else aboard seemed to get more animated and excited as we sped onward, I felt myself withdrawing.\u00a0 I spent a lot of time journaling and contemplating, but mostly I was just chasing my tail, going over and over the same worries, without resolving anything.<\/p>\n Sometimes it just feels like there\u2019s too much going on in your life to process of it.\u00a0 In my case, this involved overload on several fronts, all of them beginning with \u201cwhat to do about\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n What to do about where I was going to go; about who I was becoming; about this nagging fear that someone, somewhere, was still after me.\u00a0 What to do about the illogical contradiction between feeling horribly alone in the universe, and at the same time being surrounded by too many people I felt a useless, inconvenient and uncomfortable attraction toward.\u00a0 No matter how I chewed on these things, I couldn\u2019t seem to make any headway at all toward clarity, and as the Enterprise<\/i> sped toward Earth, I knew I was likewise speeding blindly toward some profound and irreversible turn in my life.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the most obvious matters.\u00a0 Jim had kissed me.\u00a0 Then Bones had made it clear he was hurt by my scheme to divert his attentions elsewhere; made it clear with that hand on my thigh.\u00a0 What the hell was going on?<\/p>\n This simply would not do, I told myself over and over.\u00a0 It was plain wrong.\u00a0 Even more wrong was the fact (I would barely admit this even to myself at the moment) that, whenever I let my memory play over either of those incidents, I found myself smiling, goofily, and pleasantly a-tingle.<\/p>\n That is so wrong, Hani.<\/i><\/p>\n And I couldn\u2019t stop myself from thinking in old ways.\u00a0 I admit this, Reader, only because I\u2019ve sworn to tell you the truth.\u00a0 Sometimes I drifted off into fantasies about what it would be like to fall in love, to marry, even. Who, you may ask, was the subject of these girlish reveries?<\/p>\n Pick one.<\/p>\n Apparently that was something I wasn\u2019t capable of doing myself.<\/p>\n What would it be like to marry a Starship Captain?\u00a0 (or Physician, or\u2026 whoever).\u00a0 The romance of that idea didn\u2019t stretch very far.<\/p>\n Really, think about it: \u00a0me, the little wifey, just sitting around some planet waiting for my guy to decide to show up whenever he likes, every few years, with his tall tales and his dirty laundry, then wham, bam, thank you ma\u2019am, he\u2019s off again and there I am, alone.\u00a0 Again.<\/p>\n No, Hani, no.\u00a0 Of course, the bigger joke was that there never existed a pool of less marriageable men in the entire history of, well, men.\u00a0 Every man jack of them married already – to their ship, their jobs.<\/p>\n Which led me to an even less expected admission: as much as I\u2019d like to have some dependable affection in my life, I was beginning to believe I might never want to marry again.<\/p>\n I was beginning to face the evidence that I might, after all, be a born nomad.\u00a0 And I was oddly okay with that.<\/p>\n There was just this one other little messy bit of intuition, these little recurring hits of certainty that were annoyingly persistent and consistent: I was viscerally aware that there was some remaining piece of karmic business yet to play out with these guys.<\/p>\n I had no idea what it was, what it would look like, or feel like.<\/p>\n Just as well.\u00a0 I would have totally freaked if I\u2019d had any idea what was coming.\u00a0 And sooner than I imagined.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The nagging fear part wasn\u2019t helped by an off-hand comment from Uhura one evening when we were sitting together over a quiet drink.<\/p>\n I\u2019d already been silently working myself into kind of a state, thinking, yet again, about how Spock had spirited me away so quickly from the mayhem on Virgilian, how odd it had seemed, how\u2026 protective.\u00a0 But protective against what?<\/p>\n \u201cI suppose the Captain told you they may want you to testify before the Board.\u00a0 It\u2019s okay, though, I think he\u2019s convinced them it\u2019s not necessary.\u201d\u00a0 Uhura tossed this bombshell in casually, just being helpful.<\/p>\n I froze.\u00a0 This was the first I\u2019d heard of any Board, any hearing.\u00a0 She must have assumed Jim was keeping me updated, but I\u2019d been halfway avoiding him since we left Virgilian.\u00a0 Good thing I was a master at the open-ended non-response response.\u00a0 I just nodded and said something vague, and so she went on to offer that it wasn\u2019t the first time Jim had been before a Board of Inquiry, and that he was a favorite of a lot of the Starfleet command, the former field guys who identified with his boldness.\u00a0 It was some of the bureaucrats in the Federation who apparently didn\u2019t like him, like that man Culpepper, the one who\u2019d requested the formal review, but their influence wouldn\u2019t go too far with Starfleet, she assured me.<\/p>\n Culpepper again?<\/p>\n Was it Jim he was after, or me?<\/p>\n What, exactly, was I going \u2018home\u2019 to?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" < previous\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 next > Love is a world itself. Either you are in, at the center\u2026 either you are out, yearning. Shams Tabrizi \u00a0 Once the colonists were completely situated and provisioned, our … Continue reading ![\"300px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17\"](\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/300px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n
\nEither you are in, at the center\u2026
\neither you are out, yearning.<\/i><\/p>\n