I am a Vagabond Astronaut.

Isolation is something I both desire and fear.  On one hand, the bustle of the city where I used to live overwhelmed me with unrelenting clamor.   Now, I live on the fringes of a smaller city where there are more trees than buildings.  My wife goes out to work Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.  I remain home.  I venture out in the warm weather to get some circulation, but as the days grow short and the weather gets colder, I hide myself in the shell of my office.  Many of my friends are scattered around the country.  I communicate with them mostly via social media and get togethers are increasingly rare.  Most everyone else is out at work as well.  Those that I greet in my new building rarely go beyond, “Hey, how’s it going?  Can I share this elevator?  What’s your name?   Mine is ____.  Okay, have a happy (insert holiday here)!”  That’s about as far as it goes.

We have concierges and custodians in our building that I am friendly with, but again the greeting ritual is brief and we learn next to nothing about each other.  I exercise in the gym and I rarely see anyone there.  I think I’m the only person that steps into our small library.

My wife and I do have a friend in the person of a physical trainer.  We talk in depth about film, comics, music, our youth and family life.  While our trainer has much to say about his family, Suze and I are left with little to say beyond each other.  We only meet with our trainer once out of the week.  So we are left with meeting people in the building, sharing the usual pleasantries, and moving on.

We also have a good friend from my years in the police department.  We have get togethers, usually at a movie, but the demands of his job make our hang out time very rare.

I believe my feelings of loneliness took a strange turn in the form of a dream.  I was chosen to be an astronaut by a cabal of scientists.  They wrapped me up in a wad of aluminum foil and cast me out into space.  I couldn’t calculate it, but a large span of time passed.  I landed softly on a planet similar to Earth except the skies were yellow.  I was unwrapped from my aluminum foil and welcomed by a group of teenagers.  They invited me into a classroom where they got me involved in a science project.  There was a woman my age who stood just beyond the group and smiled at me.  I contributed as little as possible to the teenagers’ project because they learned at a faster rate than I could.  Finally the woman approached me and said, “Wouldn’t you like to  stay with us?  I’d like you to stay.”  She took my hand gently into hers.  I shook my head sadly, believing I had to leave her.  I said, “I’m sorry.   I don’t belong here.  I’m too old and set in my ways.”  She looked sad as the teenagers wrapped me up in my aluminum foil and set me out on my lonely voyage through deep space.  I woke up thinking I had turned down the greatest opportunity of my life.

A similar dream involved a cyclops like creature coming to earth.  He spoke with me saying that he was engineered and not born like most living things.  The people who made him cast him out into space in order for him to find a new home or to die trying.

I asked, “Could you find a home here on Earth?  We wouldn’t turn you away.”

He shook his cyclopean head sadly, “There is no one like me here.  No one would feel at ease with me.  I must keep searching even if I never find a home.”  He disappeared by some means I couldn’t recognize.  He didn’t arrive in a spaceship - which is the way we travel into space in reality and science fiction.  He simply vanished without any fanfare.

When I woke up, I decided to commemorate the space faring creature from my dreams in a drawing which I drew by hand, and colored using an app.  I never finished it completely because of my lack of belief in happy accidents, much like my Cosmic Carpet.

I’ve had many dreams in one form or another where I have been banished into deep space, never to return to earth.  I never die, but I never find a home.  I follow a trail of ancient planets and artifacts in these dreams, but there is no place for me to live and thrive.

In real life, I am a happily married man for 21years.  However, we rarely find a chance to meet up with other friends.  That is probably due to all of us having work during the day and a need to sleep at night.  It’s not like our childhood or young adulthood where there is always freedom to hang out and fraternize.  However, I am lonely very often and I seek the companionship of good friends.

For most of the time, I am that vagabond astronaut, seeking a home I cannot find.

-JJB