It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up.

“Everything is turned upside down these days,” the man in the middle seat says. We are settling into our overnight flight around the world, JFK to Istanbul, and I had just commented on how the plane had only been half full when I flew in December, the “busy season.” Now it was completely packed, in the “off season.”

“Nothing goes the way it’s supposed to go these days,” he says, giving me that familiar glance. We both know the conversation can go a dozen different ways — all of them eventually merging into the same dead end. Climate and immigration and poverty and injustice and politics. Politics.

I decide to steer clear — partly because it’s almost midnight and I’m exhausted. But mostly because if the conversation goes south, we still have twelve hours next to each other. I finally reply, “Well, hopefully this plane goes where it’s supposed to go.”

He glances back at me, this time quite seriously, and then looks out my window as he signs the cross over his chest with his right hand and whispers a silent prayer. He does this again when the plane backs out of the loading dock. And when the security announcement comes on. And when he takes his meds. And then continually as we start speeding past the red runway lights, then above Queens, then above Long Island, then above Brooklyn, then into the moon-lit Atlantic Ocean clouds.

Eventually he starts watching a movie with Turkish-looking subtitles and I fall asleep reading James Baldwin. The…