Sitting in the bed of her truck, Alice sat there with tears falling down her face. It was midnight and a school night. She had no business being out this late in her hometown of 500 neighbors, all of which know her entire past, present, and probably future.

Alice reminisces about the years she spent in school, the friends she’s had since their days of birth. She has lived the same day over and over since kindergarten, wake up and gather fresh eggs from the chicken coop, make breakfast for herself and daddy, enter the doors of the same school for all 13 years of school, and spend her weekends drinking ice cold coors light beers that were bought from Bobby’s older brother. The boys here are mostly farmers and marry their 5th grade girlfriends, have babies, cheat on them, abuse them, and then either die of alcoholism or don’t die until 99, even though their wife was hoping they would 20 years ago.

“I don’t want this”, Alice says out loud to herself. She wants more for herself. She wants to be curious, do adventurous things, find herself beyond the town lines. It’s slightly scary to her, this is all she’s ever known. But she’s homesick and needs healing.

She’s admiring the consistency of the stars. When Alice sees them, she can see hundreds at once. But they are billions of light years away from eachother. She thought of this place she has called home for her whole life, such a tiny minuscule piece of the world.

“I will reach for the stars”, Alice also says out loud (because that means it’s real). They all say the space between the stars is too big, the space between Alice’s current life and her daydreamed life is too big. But Alice can see the distance between the stars. It may be too big, too hard to reach, too hard to get there, but Alice already knows her future if she stays here. And staying at one star is scarier than going through space and reaching the unknown of another star. She can see the space between the stars and that means she can reach her desired destination.