And if this is home, welcome home.

As my departing flight from Houston swiftly descended through a layer of clouds and into Kansas City, the hedgerows and swaths of cropland came into view first. I have been in this airspace many times before but the gratitude that settled on my skin during this landing was a new feeling.

When things are good in my headspace it is my favorite place to be and when I can bring outside connections, colors, and words deep into the lowest part of my brain, that’s where the real life-changing delight happens.

I listened to the announcements of the flight attendant trickle into the cabin as the plane came closer to its final resting place in terminal b. She announced the local time and proclaimed the weather to be 78 degrees, but what’s the actual heat index, I thought. She welcomed new people to this new city and then welcomed the people who make a business of returning. The people like me.

And if this is home, welcome home, she said.

I have called my family’s farm south of the city home for all of my life but this is the first time in my adult years that I have chosen it, that I have allowed it to be the place that anchors me to this earth. I am sure that tomorrow, I will choose it again. The love I have here and the memories of the people who worked this land for a living are what have and will draw me home from India or any other developing world.

I am fairly certain that each day for the rest of my time living I will be able to choose this place as my home. That coming back to the place that reminds me of who I am, where my blonde hair and that once crooked tooth of mine come from, is my choice alone. Nothing that is not of my own creation will keep me from this place, not war, not death, not famine.

As long as we don’t wake up in tomorrow's version of The Handmaid's Tale I will make the choice to come home because choice is all it takes to get me home.

When I stood up from my comfort class seat I assessed my area for any small parts of me that may be left behind, my iPhone, the book I was reading by Melinda Gates, and then I asked myself was my $70 upgrade worth it. Was the hour and 45 minutes I spent with extended legroom worth the transfer of funds from my Wells Fargo account to the Goliath that is United ticketing and upgrades.

And then because my mind does not allow any good sweet thing to come without a bitter note of sadness I thought about the footage of Afghan asylum seekers being packed onto a military aircraft as they seek refuge from the place they called home. And then of course, because that first bitter note is a downward spiral into full mouth-puckering horror, I thought about crowded tarmacs and people falling from the sky because they were trying to hold on to hope.

I thought about the piled-up bodies of those men and boys they showed on the world news who were resisting the Taliban and I wondered how much fear they felt the moment their hands were tied behind their backs. I wonder if that was their moment of knowing that home was no longer theirs to choose. I wonder if that was the scariest part.

I thought about women holding on to babies as those planes landed in places that looked and felt nothing like home and then I wondered if anyone offered them welcome or words of assurance, not in English but the language of their home.

I wonder if the Afghan people get to hear the words of our not-so-fearless leader as he justifies the leaving. I wonder what they think when he describes the withdrawal as untidy as if there is a tidy way to turn a country of women and children and men not involved in warring into martyrs.

I don’t know much about war but I know about death and I know about leaving. It’s not the people who do the leaving that will suffer it is the people left behind. It is the people who are children and the people who are women with no options. Their fear is the fear of staying without choice.

I wonder if they see themselves as victims of a war that belongs to them or a war that belongs to us, because I see it as a war that belongs to us, the war of our choosing, and the war of our leaving.

For the lucky few who make their way onto these crowded aircrafts each day and away from a situation, not of their making, I hope there are people and places ready to welcome them into the States. I hope the words of support I see on social media from both conservatives and liberals continue as Afghan feet set foot on soil that is oceans and air miles away from the place they had been.

I hope when that plane makes its final domestic descent, someone tells them, even if this never feels like home or reminds you of who you are or the people you come from, welcome anyway.