When I was little, I laid outside and stretched my arms up to the sky to touch the great moving clouds rushing past. As streams of dewy mist trailed between my fingers, I heard my mother calling anxiously for me on the deck below. The sky, wide and limitless, frightened her, and she forbade me to ascend the bow. “We were made from the ground, and to the ground we return,” she cautioned. But I was born in the sky, and I am not afraid.

My mother was born on the ground, just like my father. That’s where they met. They lived a “regular life” in a “regular suburb” until the government corralled everyone important onto airships and bid the ground farewell. My mother wasn’t important, but she was pregnant with me so they saved her. Someone’s grandfather gave his life for mine, his memory forever drowned by a sea of lava. I ascended the bow every morning and gave quiet thanks to his fiery grave.

I think about those times often now that I’m grown. I spend most of my days in the belly of the ship, babysitting the engine that keeps us afloat. My mother is proud of me. “Safe, honorable, secure,” she would croon about my job. My father agrees with her, like he always does. But sometimes, when the sunlight catches the smoke at just the right angle, my mind wanders back to the great moving clouds on that bow, and a smile threads across my face. A sense of belonging fills my heart.

I was born in the sky, and I am not afraid.