I always wanted a baby. Something that was me, and not me at the same time. Another glimmer to the diamond walls around my life, a hopeful ray of light. I don’t know why this desire was always in me, but I suspect it was partly my destiny programming, and partly my own loneliness.

It wasn’t possible, but if it had been, I would’ve liked a choice. When it became possible, I had no choice.

Alex, well, all the guys really, were really nice about it, and gave us the decision. But the decision was either not take the chance and lose Alex, or take the chance. There were no other options. I hate Michael’s mother with a passion. In the end, the choice was made for us.

Aaron was born nine months later, in the middle of the planet’s night. He came into the world calm, gentle, and beautiful. He reminds me of his father.

Keeping him with us wasn’t easy, but somehow Max and Liz made a pact with Michael’s mother, and everything was, if not okay, at least calmer.

Then the fighting began, and I had no choice but to leave Aaron behind and go to war. The aliens wouldn’t let us take our spouses with us; they thought they would be a weakness. So I left Aaron with his father and his Aunt Liz, and prayed for the best.

The battle took weeks, more weeks then I would care to count, even if I did have a calendar. I don’t care to think about that battle; it hurt my soul, even if I wasn’t wounded. When the fight was over, and we had won, my little Aaron was two years old, and didn’t even know me. I had to start over.

I think about home a lot. I don’t mean our “home” on the smaller continent of this planet, where we lived until the fighting began. I mean my real home, with mom and dad, back in Roswell, New Mexico. The others don’t talk about it much; they all believe we have nothing to go back to, but I have memories of a time where I could be happy with my friends in a place where we were safe and accepted.

Acceptance. That is what we all thought we’d find here. When we daydreamed about “home” we thought they would be people like us, who thought like us and spoke like us and dreamed like us. Not like this. Our daydreams did not have the cold condescension behind their eyes.

I dream about home, now, as the place where the sun blazed hot across the endless desert, the place where aliens were rumor and myth, the place where my Aaron could grow up like any human boy, instead of being plastered with rules and orders.

Alex isn’t happy either, but he’d never let me know it. He thinks I like it here, or at least he pretends to think so. He knows me better, I think, than I know myself. He knows I want to like it here, so he lets me think I do. I love him so much, it hurts sometimes.