I shift awkwardly in my chair, tugging first at my sweater, then shirt. I can’t get comfortable, I’m anxious and stress sweating. I turn the page of the magazine I’m reading. It sticks to the page behind it slightly, I peel them apart and keep reading. The plane suddenly lurches again and I grip my own knee with my free hand, and despite my better judgement, I look out the window at the frozen expanse below. We’re flying over densely forested mountains…are these the Rockies?…and the plane has been rocking and rolling ever since we took off, doing the type of acrobatics usually reserved for air shows. Have I mentioned I’m a bad flyer? Yes, at least a thousand times.

I turn the page again, then turn it back. Despite the half-a-Xanax I took, I’m still on-edge and not actually reading any of the words. The pages are sticking again…did my water bottle in my backpack open? I lean over, head pressed against the seatback in front of me, eyes just inches away from the “air sickness bag”, reach into my backpack. I glance over at my seatmate, a blond mom who’s been deftly navigating her kids. She pretends not to notice me contorting myself into my backpack like a gay middle aged member of Cirque Du Soleil, she is missing me at my most glamorous. I rummage around inside it with my hand, yes, yes, it’s wet, yes, my water bottle must have burst open from the change in cabin pressure once we took off.

I retract my hand and sit up as the beverage and snack cart reaches our aisle. I pick cookies instead of pretzels because I will always, always pick cookies because I am a child, and as the attendant hands them to me my hand, still clammy from my backpack, brushes hers. I see a frown barely register on her face as I dart my eyes away. I am now That Guy in 14D with Hands That Are Wet for No Discernible Reason. I lean back, feeling a slight, welcome caress of the Xanax waving over me, and sink into light slumber.

The plane jolts and groans, a huge hole casually appears in the fuselage about six rows ahead of me and across the aisle. The cabin is suddenly brighter and the arctic wind sucks all of our breath out, it shrieks barely louder than all the passengers as the cabin shudders and buckles. I press my face against the window and see the ground and trees rushing up to meet the plane and then everything is black. I come to, the passengers are crying, moaning. We recover, wait to be rescued. Over the course of hours then days it slowly dawns on us that rescue may never come. We bury the bodies of the dead in the mountainside (thankfully, surprisingly few), start to ration the airline peanuts and sodas. I learn to hunt, grow a beard, I make a makeshift hut. We form a society with a council of elders and representatives from each neighborhood. We live off the land, our bodies adapt to the high altitude, we are a proud and strong people. We cry together when the first elder dies, we celebrate with joy together when the first child is born. Occasionally we will see planes flying high above in the sky, the route we once took, we will wonder absently why no one looked for us, we speculate we may have been a plane entirely filled with people no one would miss.

Over time, generations more are born, generations more die, we forget where we came from and how we were cast our of the sky, we eventually form a small undiscovered society that has a powerful tenet: make nothing with metal. This is culturally passed down from the plane crash but its origin is forgotten in the passage of time. We make tools, weapons, and even mechanisms from wood and wood alone. Once day our scientists discover indicators of a great flood coming that will envelop the earth, and the decision is made to build a massive vessel made of wood to protect and carry everyone to safety. Our entire society shifts gears to accommodate this task, and slowly a religion called The Work is born that reveres the constr-

The plane lurches and I wake up, sweaty and disoriented. Wait why are my hands still wet? I lift a hand up from the New Yorker on my lap, it sticks for a moment and then lets go. I subtly, secretly lift my hand to my nose, take a timid sniff. Oh no. It wasn’t my water bottle that burst.

It was my bottle of lube.

We circle for 20 minutes before we land because of “freezing fog”. God hates fogs. After we land, I scamper to the bathroom to wash my shame off, but truly, it will never wash completely off. I take note of the airport once I leave the bathroom: dated red brick walls, but under renovation. There’s a restaurant off to one side that is literally called “Jedediah’s”, the smell of something deep frying lingers in a cloud I walk through as I pass it. I exit the secure part of the airport, and there he is, up ahead: Emmett. As we smile and move to embrace, he mutters “Welcome to Missoula, Montana” I pull back.

“Thanks, that’s perfect for this part of the narrative where I have to tell people where I landed”.

He replies, “Sure thing, did you give me a good alias?”

“Yes, I’m calling you Emmett.”

“Okay. Did you already tell them how we met?”

“No, I’m trying to write about my dating life less; it’s felt juvenile lately and I feel like I keep relearning the same lessons over and over.”

“That makes sense. Hey, we aren’t actually having this conversation are we?”

Emmett and I met online, he visited Portland a few months ago for a whirlwind of a trip. The trip was low stakes and casual since we knew that even if we clicked, we couldn’t see each other for months afterwards because of life. We kept in touch and now we were finally reuniting. As we leave the airport, my mittened hand touches the small of Emmett’s back lightly through his peacoat. This is enough, this has to be enough, this small delicate touch to let him know I am here and I thought of him.

Emmett shows me his city, and Missoula is not what I expected. It is as if someone got a Shrinkydink set of Portland and stuck it in the oven. We trudge from shopping to eating to location scouting for a photo I want to take. I strip my clothes mostly off and take a funny staged photo in the snow pretending I’m on a beach for the ‘gram, shivering to stay warm for the ‘gram, my feet slowly but surely turning blue for the ‘gram. I look up and there she is, a figure in the distance. My breath catches. Here comes Emmett’s wife, Amelia.

Emmett was already out to his wife when they got married in Ogden Temple. Over the years, they both explored the depths of their commitment to the Mormon church; this meant Emmett explored being a gay man, and Amelia became comfortable with her asexuality. In the process, their love produced a curious and well behaved kid, Eda. After meeting Amelia in the snowy field where I was taking the photo, we scooped up Eda and had delicious pizza. Emmett and I left afterwards and checked into our cozy, perfect Airbnb nearby.

Another day, he and I are on the couch in Emmett’s place, and Amelia came over and sat on the other side of him. I feel like swatting her hand away. What in the holy living Kermit is this? I think to myself. I focus instead on the Steven Universe episode playing, I try to get to a place of compersion.

“Hey,” I whisper to him, “I’m doing my best and I’m trying to quell these feelings of jealousy.”

“I appreciate that,” he whispers back, “I know this is new for you and I really love that you’re trying to overcome your preconceptions.”

“Thanks”, I say and squeeze his hand. Then, Amelia swings her legs over his and her foot brushes my knee. My testicles beat a hasty retreat up into my body as every pore on my skin closes and I casually forget to breathe for a full minute or two.

Emmett sees my reaction. “Since this conversation isn’t actually happening, you should tell your readers what compersion is now.”

Oh! “Compersion” isn’t actually a word you can find in the dictionary yet. Broadly defined, it’s the feeling of happiness or joy you get when someone else feels happiness or joy. On the surface it’s a deeper version of empathy, but the term has been adopted by the polyamory community, a community that seems to have tools to vocabulary to cope with those feelings of jealousy and envy that we’ve been programmed to think are normal for centuries. I won’t say I’m there quite yet, but as with all things related to my heart, I am doing my best.

Over the next few days Emmett played tour guide and patient camera-and-prop wrangler. I was obsessed with finding butterflies and a large bear cutout for a photo because that is what makes the lambs stop screaming for me. We get on a bus to go across town; Amelia has the car that day to get to work. We sit together towards the back of the bus, and as the passengers load on after us, I sense Emmett tense up.

The young lady sits across from us, a name badge from the church on her modest black blazer. She smiles at us, I smile back, not seeing Emmett’s thin lipped acknowledgement. She starts:

“So where are you guys headed?”

I reply, “Michaels! We need to grab some butterflies for a photo.”

“Oh I love Michaels!”

Emmett: “I actually work there. And it’s fine but it’s work, ya know.”

I break in, “He’s being so nice to take me there on his day off.

“I don’t mind,” says Emmett to me, “You’re visiting all the away from Portland.”

“Oh, are you from here then?” she asks.

Emmett, suddenly: “So. How long have you been a missionary?

She blinks once, twice, almost unnoticeably I see her take in his long hair, his beard, our proximity. “Oh! About 14 months.”

“You’re getting close to finishing then,” Emmett notes.

“Have you talked to missionaries before?” she asks.

Not breaking her gaze, he replies: “I served in Brazil.”

“Oh, how was that?”

“Well…I loved the people, but I was depressed for about half of it. I have disagreements with how missions work. So, where are you from?

“Oh! You’ve probably never heard of it. Payson,” she replies.

Cooly, casually, Emmett: “Yeah, I’ve been to Payson, my pioneer ancestors founded Payson. Your temple is pretty new, huh? I think I went to it a couple times when I was in school.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty new.

“It’s a beautiful temple. I got married in the Ogden temple though- after the renovations. Before that it looked like a 70s space cupcake.”

I stifle a laugh at this description. The sister does not look at me. She and Emmett are just smiling at each other, trying to out-Mormon each other. She pulls her last card:

“So, do you still go to church?”

“I haven’t been in a long time, no.”

“Well you should go! I’m sure they’d love to have you.”

“Thanks. This is our stop.”

And with that, she hands us each a card with a number to the church on the back. I almost think Emmett won’t take it, but he does, puts it in his pocket without glancing at it. I smile at her and as we get up my hand again finds the small of his back. I don’t look back to check if she sees this.

He tells me later that she got on with another missionary and they separated without a word, to cover more territory in the bus. Sometimes ghosts never let you forget them. Sometimes they’re not even people, they’re your past.

The next day, I fly back to Portland. Somehow the flight back is even more turbulent than the one there. I think of one of my favorite holiday movies, “Home for the Holidays” with Holly Hunter, and of a character next to her on the plane as it jolts; the character is devouring fried chicken that she brought onto the plane and reassuring the Holly Hunter character that the wings go right through the plane, they’re even sturdier than the fuselage itself. Turbulence is instability, it’s chaos, it’s the unexpected and the unknown.

I got this. My wings go right through me.