I've always been fearless on flights. My earliest memory is of sitting curled in an airplane seat thousands of feet above Paris, watching and waiting for the ground to get closer as the plane descended. I've flown through Thai thunderstorms with even the flight attendants screaming and clutching one another through every tilt and bounce.
At age eleven, I started making the fourteen-hour trek from London to Hong Kong alone, buoyed by the thought of seeing my parents on the other side, gritting my teeth bravely through the turbulence and pulling my seatbelt tighter across my lap. I've always been fine on flights. As travelers, we have to be. We want to see things, don't we? So we cope.
But think about it too much and you'll run into the question of probability. How many times can I fly, I wonder in my darker moments, before my luck runs out? When worried, I tend to think of airline travel in terms of those customer loyalty programs you find at coffee shops and sandwich places, where they stamp your card for the first nineteen Mochaccinos you buy and then give you the twentieth one for free. I've taken countless, countless plane journeys over the last 26 years of my life. I'm always wondering how many times my card has been stamped.
I'd been in London for a few weeks recently, exploring the city I'd come to call home before heading back across the Atlantic to the one I was actually living in. I'd found parks I'd never been to, pubs I'd never sat in, whole streets and alleys I'd neglected to wander down the last time I was there. It was as though someone had annotated the map while I'd been away. "Put a whole new part of town in just here," they'd said. "That'll keep her busy."
On the short connecting flight from Newark to Charleston, I had a window seat next to a slab of a man, a great big bear in a striped linen shirt. He didn't have hands, he had paws. He didn't have a neck, he had a large piece of roast beef in its place. He had a face like a bulldog, a tan from a bottle, and the entirely confident notion that yes, he COULD wear a man-bracelet and loafers without socks and not be teased for it, because if you teased him for it, so help you God, you'd find yourself in tiny pieces at the bottom of the Hudson river quicker than you could say Uncle Vito.
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