I Said I'd Go To The Ends of the Earth With You, But I Lied.

My name is Amelia. When I was a kid, I told people that I'd been named for Amelia Earhart, a famous woman pilot, explorer, adventurer, and the bravest woman who had ever lived. I bragged that I would grow up to be just like her. There were only two problems with this story: 1) My parents had really named me after a rich, old, spinster aunt in the hopes she'd put them in her will, and 2) The First Amelia had flown off on a great adventure and was never heard from again.

I was raised to believe that if I set my mind to something and worked hard, I could accomplish anything I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was to go to SPACE. Like the First Amelia, I would go places no one else had ever gone, become a role model for young men and women, and would go down in history. My best friend, Jimmy, shared my dreams, so we charted out a Life PLAN that would take us to where we wanted to be....SPACE.

We grew up in a small suburb outside of Chicago named Berwyn, IL. My great grandparents had moved there from Europe in the early 1900's, a married couple only seventeen years old, and were seeking the American Dream. They never went back to Europe, never saw their parents again, and never ventured more than 50 miles from Berwyn. They also never learned to speak English, as everyone in that town spoke Czech. My grandparents spoke broken English, its own language that only people who had grown up in Berwyn understood. My parents only knew how to swear in Czech, having spent time in an American school system. Since I was an American girl, I only spoke English, and was expected to make something of myself since I was the only reason my great grandparents had spent many miserable weeks throwing up in the bottom of an old and airless steamship coming to America so that I could make something of myself. It was a big responsibility, but I was up to it. Same with Jimmy - we were Golden. We'd go to Space.

When we were little kids, we'd practice being astronauts. I'd put on Grandpa's big, black rain galoshes and pretend to moon walk on the top of the garage. Jimmy would put a big glass cookie jar on his head and pretend he was wearing a real astronaut's helmet. It was fun until I fell off of the garage roof and broke my arm, and the paramedics had to come and pry the cookie jar off of Jimmy's head.

After that, we stuck to safer environments. We took as many high school science classes as we could, signed up for every "Future Astronauts" workshop at the Adler Planetarium, joined Scouts so we could learn survival skills and self reliance, attended summer programs at the Houston Space Center, and earned advanced degrees from NASA approved universities. We then did grunt work for many years - learning to clean and disinfect "space toilets", helping to prepare packets of disgusting looking food, and pretending to laugh at stale jokes about being attacked by space monsters and aliens. We grinned and bared it to prove we had the Right Stuff. The day Jimmy and I heard that we had been assigned to an actual Mission, we knew it had been all worth it.

After all the time we had spent together, we assumed that we were in love and would spend the rest of our lives together, exploring SPACE.

After one week in a claustrophobic tiny capsule, we could barely stand one another. We could only discuss what the mission could reveal, or stare into darkness for so long, or wonder how we had put up with each other for so long. Even complaining about the food and comparing it to bodily fluids wasn't funny anymore.

I guess it was out of boredom that our minds began to wander and play tricks on us. We became slightly paranoid. We had been told that our mission was a Priority, A National Security Top Secret. We didn't know where we were going, what we'd be doing once we got there, or how long we'd be gone. Our brief was...brief. Now, with all this time on our hands, we begin to wonder, to question, what we were doing here. What had been exciting was now mindless, and I was searching to bring back the warm and comfortable friendship Jimmy and I had once shared. With that in mind, I decided to broach the subject.

"Hey Jimmy, what do you think the purpose of this mission is? Shouldn't we be spending time preparing for whatever we're supposed to do once we get there? And where exactly is "THERE"? What's the big secret? When will we go home? If it's another three or four months, I'll have to start Christmas shopping. What do you want for Christmas, Jimmy?"

"What I want is for this Mission to be over, and for you to shut the hell up."

So much for the warm and comforting feelings I had hoped for.

Hours passed. I'm not sure when or even if I heard it or felt it, but I was beginning to feel that we weren't along. I was still mad that Jimmy had been mean to me, but I needed to tell him what I was sensing.

"Hey, Moron, did you hear that?"

"This is Mission Control. We can hear everything you're saying. Show a little respect when speaking to one another."

"Sorry."

I turned to Jimmy and mouthed, "Hey, MAJOR moron, did you hear that?"

"Yeah, but it was probably just our imaginations."

"But I have the weirdest feeling that we are being watched. I think I can even hear something breathing." She began to sweat.

Suddenly, Jimmy began to grin, smile, then laugh.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Are you starting to lose it."

"Don't you get it? THIS is the Mission. This is the THERE you asked about. It's an experiment...we're an experiment. NASA is testing us to see how we'll react to fear, boredom, terror".

"Those sons-a-bitches" She was feeling both anger and relief.

She turned and looked at Jimmy, then turned her head slightly as the noise got closer. And then, like the First Amelia, she was never heard from again.