ad astra.

for as long as i can remember, my favorite genres in fiction and film were fantasy and sci-fi. it was inevitable that eventually i would find star trek.

i actually discovered it through the james blish novelizations of the original series, which is a bit embarrassing to admit to anyone who is also a fan of the show. but it was in reading them that i realized i already knew the episodes, from seeing them as a tiny child, and from there, i was drawn in without a struggle.

i would walk through the halls of high school, imagining i was walking through the corridors of the enterprise, and kirk and crew found their way into much of the poetry i wrote for my creative writing course. at night in the summertime, i would sit outside in the dark yard, looking up at the vast territories in which they had their adventures, and every satellite moving like a star across the night sky became the enterprise in orbit.

the only model i ever made was one of the enterprise. i never could get the nacelles to stay glued on.

it continued on into college, where i terrorized my roommate with the (admittedly) overlarge portrait poster of mr. spock. but that poster -- so big, so obnoxiously trek, so orange! -- caught the eye of the other trek fan in the dorm, and we've been friends ever since.

together, she and i sat on the floor in the dorm lounge every week watching star trek: the next generation, then nitpicked the show and replayed the best lines. once a month or so, you could find us in the library, watching a video of star trek iv: the voyage home. we would pantomime our favorite bits. we called ourselves "trek twits" and we were unrepenitent.

i went to cons, i met the actors, i got autographed pictures. i bought the books, taped every episode, bought a few toys, learned a few phrases in klingonese.

over the years after college, my interest waned. deep space nine was good, but veered off-course toward the end of its run, voyager was a favorite even though its technobabble was dense, and the last gasp enterprise seemed far off the mark; i could only watch a few episodes before giving up on the franchise. my figurines ended up getting packed up, my books slowly weeded out and given away.

i wasn't a trekkie anymore.

then this new movie came out, and it looked good. in fact, it looked exciting, and i was dismayed: i was done with star trek, wasn't i? i'm not a trekkie anymore, that's a done deal, that's something from when i was kid, right?

but my college friend threatened to strangle me if i didn't see it before our reunion at the end of the month, so today i went.

the film-makers did such a good job with that movie! they recaptured the energy and adventure of the original series perfectly. i sat in that theatre and was returned to those days when star trek awakened my imagination and wonder for space, when sci-fi was optimistic and brash. i laughed at the in-jokes, and thrilled to the rush of action and adrenaline. i was reunited with the careless joie de vivre that always lived in the best of star trek.

so, maybe i'm still a trekkie.

i won't be pulling out my latex pointy ears from storage anytime soon, but i'll always have a sense of gratitude to gene roddenberry, and to the people who have played so brightly in the worlds he created. they gave us something surprisingly enduring.

star trek will always be both our silly dress-up games from when we were children, and our best hopes for our future selves.