When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronaut.  Actually, I wanted to be the first woman to go to Mars.  (I figured that men would already be there, and I already knew, even at five years old, that women had less privilege than men, and I thought it was that much more important that I go.)

In my imagination, the furthest I’ve traveled from home is into space, into a black hole. They are fascinating to a nerd like me, devoid of time, gravity pulling everything to it.  Nothing can escape; not even light. I used to like to draw a black hole and the event horizon surrounding it, the point at which you can’t turn back.

Why haven’t we been sucked into one, yet? Like, why haven’t all the black holes been sucking all the matter in space so much that there is no matter? And where is the center?  There has to be a point of, like, zero gravity, if you will, the point at which the sucking stops.  Where is that? What’s that like? Is there a vacuum bag? Where do all the rocks go, the rocks that are sucked in?

For realz, physically, the farthest I’ve been from home is Krakow, Poland. It was gorgeous and fun.  The Krakovian members of the travel community couchsurfing.com organized a weekend of events, and I went a few days early.  Poland had not originally been on my list of places to visit, but it was totally worth it

Emotionally, the farthest I’ve been from home was probably August 3^rd, 1997, a little town in the boot heel of Missouri. The darkest night of my life.