Growing up, I was fascinated by astronomy. I was amazed by the idea of a universe that is still expanding, even billions of years after its birth. A universe so infinite that even if you traveled millions of miles per hour, forever and ever, you would never reach the end, because it is expanding more quickly than we could ever travel. And there's always the issue of what we'd find if we did outrun the universe and then finally, after our long journey, paused long enough to peer over the edge. What would we find? A parallel universe? Or, as I imagined as a child, a physical wall, against which I would lean to take a long nap before heading home?

The laws of physics tell us that the images of my imagination were just that--my imagination; that the universe is not something our concept of reality as human beings can describe in our own finite terms or visual descriptions, and that that is the very thing that makes it the universe. And yet, I've written more stories of other worlds and dimensions than I can count without digging through the plastic bin that sits on a closet shelf in my house. That bin holds everything from my first story, written on wide-ruled notebook paper and copied on an old Xerox machine (complete with the price for which I sold the story--one dollar--to charitable teachers, relatives and friends of my parents) before I started kindergarten, to the series that I wrote and illustrated throughout my elementary, middle and early high school years. I wrote almost nothing but fantasy stories until my sophomore year of college, when my creative writing teacher at the time informed me that fantasies don't constitute good literature.

But now, even after four years of "enlightenment" through Chaucer, Shakespeare and Byron, two-thirds of a novel that is anything but a fantasy and two and a half years of living a very real nightmare, I still cling to my fantasies. Sure, learning about parallax in a stellar astronomy class helped me understand just how far away the nearest star, much less the "edge" of the universe, is from the tiny sphere that we call home. But the kid in me still says that there just has to be an end of the road, and if we could just build a really fast spaceship, we could go there. And if I can toss physics to the wind for a second, no one really knows what's out there. After all, we've never been there. I guess you could say it's the same way I feel about heaven. No one here has ever seen it, and our science can't explain it. But I still know that it's there.

Here at home, I'm exploring another universe. The "edge" I'm trying to reach is the cure for my sister--the one that I know exists. My universe is just a haystack, really, and the cure is that elusive needle. We've put men on the moon. Our spaceships have flown to the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond. This should be a much easier task. We're not limited by the laws of physics--a field of science that is so much more finite, so much more rigid than medicine. And we don't need billions of years to spare or a spaceship that defies warp speed to get there. All we need is a little time, and financial support for research, and the telling and retelling of Taylor's Tale and stories like it, over and over again. The cure is out there. And we're going to find it.