Now, years later, I was dating-seriously dating-a guy who was just days away from getting his pilot’s license. I should have been long over it.īut I never could lose the feeling that “flying” and “crashing” were kind of the same thing. I’d even once interned at an office right next to an international airport and watched planes go up and come down all day long with nary a problem. I’d read the statistics about how flying was the safest of all the modes of transportation-from cars to trains to gondolas. Just as impossibly, I survived many more trips after that, never hitting anything worse than turbulence. “I thought I was the brains,” I said, nudging her. “That’s why I’m the brains of the family.” “We’ll just be dead.” Then she snapped her fingers. And if we do crash…” She paused so I could catch her drift.Ī nod. “Because if we don’t crash, we won’t need one. I was a freshman, and she was a senior, which gave her a lot of authority. One night after lights out, I snuck to Kitty’s room and climbed into her bed. The phrase “flying to Hawaii” translated in my head to “drowning in the ocean.” The week before the trip, I found myself planning out survival strategies. I dreaded the flight from the moment they told us until well after we were home again. Why go up when gravity clearly wanted us to stay down?īack in high school, my parents took my big sister, Kitty, and me to Hawaii one year. Ever since I was old enough to think about it. THE BIGGEST IRONY about that night is that I was always scared to fly.Īlways.

How to Walk Away by Katherine Center