You smile. Yes, you say, but also no. Home is a house in a humid country, steeped in the jabber of relatives, the wet smell of the storm as it crawls through the sky. Home is more complicated than this, you express with an angling of your palm. Familial micropolitics and the taste of five-spice on your tongue and wondering how a year can change so much.

That doesn’t sound like a good home, the plane snips.

You chuckle.

No, you say, but it is a kind of home.

Being their priest is not hard.

Initially, you’d expected some formal papacy, a coven of sunken-eyed businesswomen and gap-year backpackers who now travel forever on the wings of numinosity, all whispering of wind patterns and the augurs of baggage claims. You expected scriptures inscribed in telemetric reports, some fresh compass with which you could steer your life. But there was no formal institution to uncover, no rhythm to this new life. You learn everything on the fly.

Occasionally, you see directives printed on an arrivals board; you catch sight of someone not unlike you: tousle-haired, tired, their voices scrubbed of specific origin.

By and large, however, you are alone in this.

You are not unused to this.

Fortunately, the planes never require much. Most of the time, they only want to talk. Some court dialogue and discourse, full of curiosity for the world they skim. Others prefer that you simply listen.

On a trip to Japan, you argued with your vessel; it despaired of its uncomplicated exterior, wanting desperately to be beautiful, and you said it was beloved regardless. On a flight from Iceland, you said nothing, only made soothing noises as your plane replayed an old woman’s quiet death. I tried, it wept to you.

And you whispered back, finally: I know.

Why go to that home when you have a better one here?

Planes, you’ve learned, are jealous gods. Not wrathful ones, thankfully. Not petty either. But they are contemptuous of anything that takes you away from them, sullen at the idea they might not be enough.

You shrug. It’s different, you tell the airliner.

I don’t understand, it persists, tendrilling into your memories. Out comes a montage of faces, relatives half-remembered, no names at all: Eldest Aunt, Second Eldest Uncle, an entire genealogy in numeric succession. You don’t even like them, the plane adds, sifting through your recollections of micro-aggressions, all those times you sat and clicked your teeth in cold, impotent rage. Why go?