I am the master of my fate

I’m back from New York a week today. The flight home was surprisingly empty – I was the only person in the emergency seating row, so I stretched out across the three seats and I tried to sleep. The pilot had warned before we took off that he was expecting turbulence and there was a fifteen-to-twenty-minute window where I did, in fact, think we might die. I don’t remember being afraid of flying when I was younger, in the same way I don’t remember being afraid of heights and yet here I am, nervous of both. I pretend not to be, of course. It feels embarrassing to tell a man who has taken me to a rooftop bar that I don’t want to go out onto the balcony for fear it will collapse beneath us, so I push through and I smile and I say how pretty the view is and I think to myself that he has no idea how brave I am.

The last time I experienced severe turbulence was flying from Thailand to London in 2019. My uncle lives in Hua Hin, so my mother and I went to visit him and his partner there. We hit a rough patch, the aircraft shaken like a snow globe. There was one lone voice at the back of the plane crying, plaintively, but everyone else was eerily quiet. I was holding my mother’s hand, telling her everything would be okay, that no amount of turbulence would bring a plane down. A little titbit gleaned from the husband of a