You conjure your ache for them, a pang like a needle worked through the fat of your lips, always dragging you back. The soft give of your sister’s nose when you press down on its tip, your mother’s singing, the exactness of your best friend’s enunciation. A hundred reasons to go home, a thousand tethers.

They hurt you, the aircraft objects.

You crawl back into your seat, silent. Your row-mates sleep propped against each other, the woman’s black hair like an oil-slick spread over her partner’s shoulder. They smell of expensive perfume and cheap wine, a faint sourness. You smile at your reflection in the screen, and she frowns in return, her eyes glowing green.

Hurt is a part of being human, you tell your god.

I’d never hurt you, it sulks.

Yes, you sigh, but that’s not the point.

They don’t deserve you, it hisses.

Perhaps not, you say as you palm your reflection. But that’s not the point either.

The plane sighs and the cabin convulses: so what is?

You think about it for a second.

Love, you declare, is the point.

If you had said yes that day, they would have never let you leave again. You would have spent your whole life in airports and aboard your gods, restricted to the liminality between borders, neither here nor there, no country to your name.

In exchange, they’d have given you everything. They’ve have spoiled you. Every hotel would have a suite registered to your name. Pre-paid, naturally, all incidental expenses included. Every bar would have an open tab waiting for your arrival, every restaurant a table with its finest accoutrements.

You would have grown old on caviar and smoked salmon, wagyu beef cooked precisely to your taste, designer baklava and diamondine confections. Your wardrobe would have been tax-free haute couture. Whenever you require a human diversion, you’d only have to step into the myriad massage parlours, the nail salons, the theatres with the latest productions. The planes, they take care of what is theirs.

But they would have never let you go home again.

And you could not live with that.

Love is everything, you continue.

The words spill like sleet: Love is a migration of billions, all going home. Love is the two-weeks vacation that you can’t afford to take, the sweat-salted claustrophobia of a train packed tight, the sound of footsteps keeping beat with the heart that won’t sleep until it is home, home, home.

Love is foolish, the plane says.

Love is, you agree.

You said no instead.

You said no even though it hurt you both to hear it.