I was born in a nowhere town in rural Ohio in 1975, in a house with sagging floorboards and a roof that leaked when it rained too hard. My folks, Mary and Tom, didn’t have much. Dad was a mechanic at a local garage, always smelling of motor oil, and Mom took in laundry to make ends meet. I was their only kid, their pride and joy, even if love came in the form of meatloaf on the table and Mom’s quiet humming as she mended my jeans by lamplight when the electric bill went unpaid.As a kid, I had this spark in me, or so people said-eyes that always seemed to be searching for something bigger. I kept to myself at school, but I soaked up everything. When I was 12, I found a beat-up book about the stars at the county library. That book changed me. I’d sneak out to the backyard at night, lie in the grass, and stare up at the Milky Way, dreaming I’d be an astronaut someday. The other kids laughed-“Tommy, the space cowboy from the cornfield!”—but I didn’t care. I’d borrow every astronomy book I could get my hands on, reading by flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep.Life hit hard when I was 16. Dad died in a freak accident at the garage-a car lift gave out, and he was gone. Mom fell apart, barely getting out of bed some days. I quit school to keep us afloat, hauling lumber at a construction site. My hands blistered and bled in the winter, but I never complained. “For Mom,” I’d tell myself. At night, I’d dig out old textbooks I found in the attic, studying physics and math until my eyes burned. The stars still called me, even if they felt further away than ever.When I was 25, a miracle happened. I got a scholarship to a state college in Columbus for engineering. Mom sold her old sewing machine to buy me a bus ticket and a secondhand jacket. In the city, I felt like an outsider, surrounded by kids who’d never known hunger. But I clawed my way through, studying nonstop and working nights as a campus security guard. Five years later, I had my degree. I didn’t make it to space, but I got a job designing parts for satellites. Every piece I worked on, every circuit I sketched, felt like my own little piece of the cosmos.In 2015, the world threw me another curveball-lung cancer. Doctors gave me a year, maybe two. I didn’t quit. “I’ve come too far to give up,” I told myself. Chemo tore me apart, but I kept sketching satellite designs from my hospital bed, scribbling notes for projects that might outlive me. I wrote letters to Mom, who was too frail to visit. She passed before I did, and even though I was barely holding on, I made sure her funeral had her favorite daisies. “She deserves that much,” I told the nurse.I left this world in 2017, at 42. The last night, as I lay there, the nurse asked if I had any regrets. I smiled, weak but real, and said, “None. I touched the stars, even if it was just on paper.” Somewhere up there, my work’s still orbiting, carrying a piece of me into the sky I always loved.