I had this joke I wanted to tweet last year as I shifted mental gears from a too-brief stay in Los Angeles back to what’s needed for day-to-day life in San Francisco. I don’t remember how I was going to structure the tweet exactly, mainly because I was pretty wiped out at that moment, but it was something like “shout-out to everybody else who makes peace with their own death every time they get on an airplane.” It’s half-jokes, but it’s half-true, too. I didn’t tweet it because I was about to get onto a plane and it seemed like it was in terrible taste. Reality spent a lot of 2012 calling every bluff I could come up with, and the last thing I needed was a plane to fall out of the sky and it to be my fault.

But yeah, basically: at some point in the past five years I started being afraid of airplanes. Not afraid to the point that I don’t fly when I need to, obviously, but afraid in the sense that I pay too much attention to every dip, shudder, and jerk when we’re in the air. The Fear came as a big surprise to me. I’ve been flying alone since I was a kid. I grew up grooving on fighter jets and dog fights. I’ve seen the Blue Angels several times. My hometown is near an active air base. I’ve been flying since you could do teary goodbyes at the gate instead of at the curb. Flying was how I got from Home to wherever Not-Home was at the time. It was essential, and I liked planes enough that it was fun. But that changed as I got older and I didn’t even realize it until it was too late.

The pilot on my trip to LA last year said something that threw me off, but also threw the root of my problem with planes into extreme focus. He was explaining the amenities and flight time, as usual, and he mentioned that we’d “reached our cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet… or seven miles.”

The thing is, thirty-three thousand feet is an absurd number. It’s not real. You can’t point and say “I live thirty-three thousand feet in that direction.” You can’t really grasp it. It’s a big number, in the way that a light year is big or the Pacific Ocean is big. It’s so big that it’s almost fake. It’s a number that’s big enough that all you can do is nod sagely and go “Yeah, huh, that’s pretty big.”

Seven miles, though, is concrete. It’s a small number. It’s an honest number. I know exactly how long seven miles is. I know how long it takes to drive seven miles. San Francisco is seven miles across and seven miles down. In middle and high school, when I didn’t care about physical fitness, I could walk a mile in about fifteen minutes, just enough to make the grade but not nearly fast enough to excel. I’m faster now, but let’s assume a base mile time of 15 minutes on average, times seven is one-oh-five, which puts you at just under two hours to walk seven miles, assuming a steady, leisurely pace and no breaks. Seven miles is a real number, and the pilot made me very conscious of that fact during the flight.

Being conscious of the different ways I could die is part of the problem. Part of the flying experience is being very, very aware of each and every possible death you might encounter while within an airport or airplane.

Outside the airport: if you see something, say something, snitch your face off, snitch as hard as you can because of terrorism! Also don’t park your car for longer than ten minutes, because we will send someone by to check you out in case your car has a bomb in it.

Inside the airport: terrorists got us so scared we’re looking at an orange alert, a high risk of terror attack, a five out of six on the scale. So step through this scanner, let us dust you for bomb juice, take off your shoes because one of those blew up once, and let us check you for weapons, lighters, and liquids. Yes. All of you.

At the gate: please keep your suitcases on you, because someone who has made it through our security may, in fact, have smuggled something and may want to place it inside your luggage because… that’s how these things work. Trust me. There’s a danger here.

On the plane: put your seatbelt on so turbulence doesn’t break your fool neck. These masks will give you oxygen in case we depressurize and the cabin is flooded with freezing air and your eardrums explode. Oh, and put your mask on before you put a mask on your kid’s face, because if you die first he’s definitely gonna die. Sorry. Oh! We’re really high up, too, ha ha. Are you ready to fall for minutes, not seconds, in the event of utter catastrophe?

I know in my head that flying is one of the safest ways to travel, but they do so much to convince me otherwise that by the time I get to the plane, I’m nervous and fidgety. By the time we hit turbulence, I’m thinking about how long it would take for the plane to fall out of the sky and if anything embarrassing is on my computer at home. When the plane takes a steep turn, I press my feet against the floor, desperate to change the orientation of the entire plane and keep myself steady. I grind my teeth.

Driving a car is wild dangerous, but the only advice I got the first time I got behind a wheel was “Drive slow, don’t hit anything, and try not to wreck the clutch.” That was it! Later, of course, I learned about driving in the rain and other situations, but that’s knowledge gained through experience, instead of instruction. When they give you a car, they say, “Hop in this tiny cube and fling yourself down the road at 70 or 80 em-pee-aich if you want to get anywhere on time. Wear a seltbelt.”

I used bike to work before I moved, and I still occasionally pedal around Oakland. I’m pretty tentative on the bike after my accident in 2012, but I’m still way more tentative about flying. This is despite the fact that I know firsthand how much bike accidents hurt, how easy it is to die on the road, and how often cars will make terrible decisions at your expense because them getting to a red light first is more important than being a responsible driver. Biking, especially in San Francisco, is definitely a “take your life in your own hands and pray that everyone else is paying attention” situation, but I’m still cooler with biking than I am with flying.

I’m obviously not going to stop flying. I’ve had The Fear for a few years now, and I’ve flown at least a dozen times since. It’s not bad, but it is annoying. I do think that finally realizing it was being so conscious of my own death, however unlikely it may be, is the break I needed to stop quietly trying to push my feet through the floorboards on a flight. I think, anyway — the flight from LAX back to SFO was much easier, though I did a lot of thinking about this before the flight. But we’ll see how it goes. I can’t stay in the Bay forever.