7
Wonder
Sometimes she would just look up to the night's stars, at the vast expanse of the unimaginable galaxies that sprinkled the dark abyss above.
She would just look up and imagine the different worlds up there, one full of exotic lands, unintelligible languages, and funny looking aliens. She would imagine another little girl, just like herself, looking up at the stars and beyond to imagine the same things that the human girl had.
And she would imagine meeting that other little girl and her exotic world. Perhaps she would be asari; she had heard so much about the blue aliens and was utterly fascinated at the concept. Either way, she knew that they would be best friends. They would adventure the vast galaxy with each other, perhaps on a big spaceship (hers of course), and explore the foreign landscape while making even more friends, and afterwards they could have tea and cookies.
Did aliens even like tea and cookies? she would wonder. Did they even have tea and almond cookies?
The little girl gasped at the possibility otherwise.
It was kind of funny.
In their eyes, the human girl would be the funny looking alien that spoke the unintelligible language. But that thought made her laugh because her life felt so utterly normal, what with her mother and father and big brother and big dog Sparky on Mindoir.
In her imagination, after all of the adventuring, she would bid her friends farewell for the day and always be back home by six for dinner because Mommy made the best pasta. And in her imagination Mommy would be so proud of her worldly daughter and make pasta every night. Her older brother would be nicer to her and beg to be taken on an adventure with her, to which she'd remind him of when he refused to take her to see the new Earth vids with him and his friends. Sparky would just be Sparky, her ferocious protecting war-hound puppy. War-puppy! She giggled at the word.
After dinner, she would brush her teeth and be tucked in by Daddy who would kiss her forehead and tell her that he loved her. This was the perfect vision of the Shepard family in the little girl's mind.
Sometimes the little girl would look up to the stars and imagine these things, the stars that were the vast future that lay before her to come. But all of these things got tucked far away in her mind as she was hugged and cuddled and loved by her parents before bedtime, before she realized deep inside that she was already right where she wanted to be.