There is a photograph on my classroom wall.
It is not of me.
It is a napkin, framed, that a flight attendant named Priya mailed to me a month after the flight, because she had photographed it before the twelve-year-old boy took it, and she thought I should have a copy.
It is in my handwriting.
Be the one who goes back.
My students ask about it on the first day, every year.
And that is how I tell them the whole story, about the convoy and the captain and the airplane and the little boy in Asheville with my name, and about a girl named Lily who spent all her pennies to say goodbye to her mother at the ocean, and about how the world will try, all your life, to tell you where you belong, in the back, in the drawer, in the file marked lesser.
And about how, sometimes, if you are very lucky, a cockpit door opens, and someone who remembers what you actually are stands up and refuses to let you move.
