From Elsewhere in This Universe

The bitter cold snow whipped and tore violently at my hair and face as I stumbled awkwardly through the icy snow banks. My toes felt frozen in my boots and my fingertips stung vividly with blue. My chapped lips cracked in several different places as they spread into a smile. This was how I liked it. I thudded on through the swirling white, listening to the crunch of ice beneath my big black boots with satisfaction. Finally, I could live life how I wanted to live it.

Chapter 1 – Never Ending

         "Scira, homework?” the large woman asked. I looked at this stranger I saw every day, giving her my momentary attention.
          “Sorry, I don’t have it,” I replied watching the tiny fly that kept repositioning itself in her hair like a restless sleeper. Oh, how I envied the fly with its clean slate of responsibilities. Why is it, that humans, the most capable beings on Earth, sought more than any other creature to limit themselves? I hated school, the academic wasteland I was required by law to attend almost every day, with every fiber of my being. There was nothing about the basic idea of school that offended me; a place where all children were required to learn about the world they live in and to develop their skills. If that was all that school was it would not bother me. It’s what school had become that turned me away from it.
          It would be impossible to adequately describe the intense frustration I felt from being surrounded by humans much more limited in thought than I. To watch them sit in class and struggle with trivial problems that were meaningful little more than they were difficult was the epitome of frustration to me. Of all the things I could understand so lucidly, the extreme limitation of my peers was not one of them.
         "Scira?” asked the large woman in that voice that could only mean she had just asked a question. I let my eyes survey the electron configurations of electrically neutral elements on the white board beside her in search of a clue to what she was asking of me. My small, childish hope that there would be a challenging problem awaiting me vanished quickly when I saw the question mark where the name of the element should go.
         “Argon,” I replied, accidentally letting the disappointment seep into my voice. She seemed pleased and continued on in her ridiculous quest to educate humans just as limited as she was.
         I sighed and slouched back in my chair. There was nothing I wanted more than to be out of this intellectual prison. I cast my eyes down to the tiny white eraser shavings scattered across the black desktop in front of me. As I stared, they became tiny white snowflakes floating lazily against the pitch black of the Alaskan night sky. The hair on my arms stood up on end as I felt myself leave the temperature controlled air of the classroom and enter the biting crisp air of the wide-open outdoors. Although I’d never been to Alaska, my imagination was always eager to supply a generously believable Alaskan tundra for me to immerse myself in. I don’t know why Alaska was so appealing to me, or why I fantasized about it so often without knowing much about it, but Alaska had this mysterious and alluring quality to it that drove me crazy with desire for its freezing cold winds and glistening icebergs. Just as the Christians looked to Heaven as their final destination where they could at last be at peace, I looked to Alaska as my escape from the world in which I lived. As a human, I was by nature a social creature, and I yearned for an intellectual equal. I often fantasized that I would find that person in Alaska, although I had no reasoning for this other than the senseless hope that if there were another human out there like me, perhaps they would have the same desire to go to mysterious Alaska.
         The electronic bell, of which the sound had no resemblance to an actual bell, blared over the speaker above the clock, interrupting my thoughts. I watched with disinterest as the students around me packed all of their belongings into their backpacks and swarmed towards the door, before making the motions to pack up my own things. School seemed like a never ending cycle of sitting down in a class and unpacking, then packing up and moving onto the next class where you would unpack your things again. If only I could make it to Alaska.