What’s scarier than aging? 

For one thing, falling out of the sky. Plummeting to the ground in a lifeless hunk of metal. This I discovered on my 20th birthday, sitting in the copilot seat on a runway of the Oakland International Airport, imagining for the first time all my mother’s greatest fears. 

It had been a while since I’d enjoyed a birthday. Matter of fact, I’d come to dread them. The big ones especially—16, 18, 20—held disproportionate weight. I disliked birthdays the way I disliked New Year’s, the end of a semester, the scheduled end of anything, really. Days that force you to confront the fact that time is passing whether you want it to or not. Days that force you to confront what you have or haven’t accomplished in a given time frame. Days you’re supposed to celebrate, but in reality they terrify you with their supposed importance—the fear of time misspent.

Birthdays from my early childhood once possessed a weightlessness, aided by bouncy castles and sugar highs. When I was a kid, my mom would go all out on parties. I’d select a theme and she’d see to every detail meticulously. For my eighth birthday, my mom typed out “Hogwarts acceptance letters” (invitations) on parchment paper, burned the corners by hand to make them seem more mysterious, and stamped a homemade wax seal onto each envelope.

The one thing my mom would never let me do was fly. 

I have wanted to pilot a plane ever since I was ten years old. It seemed the ultimate expression of freedom, a way to translate the magic of the middle-grade fantasy novels I obsessed over into real life. To be able to take yourself anywhere, to see the world from a high vantage point, to soar over it all. 

Shortly after moving to the Bay Area, I soft-launched this idea to my parents by suggesting that we take a family ride on one of the seaplane tours just one town over in Sausalito. We passed the cute, little, yellow planes sitting on the water every drive back from San Francisco. Various agencies advertised short voyages over the bay—the opportunity was to be a passenger, not a pilot, but it still held appeal. 

It was an instantaneous and obvious no from my mother. Decades ago, her uncle passed away in a gyrocopter accident. Any airborne vehicle smaller than a commercial plane has been off-limits to every member of our family ever since. 

Which was why the headset covering my ears and the control yoke in front of me was almost harder to believe than the fact that I was newly 20 years old. 

While I was no stranger to excessive birthday melancholy, 20 was an especially frightening number: a new decade of life, a symbolic marker of my introduction to real adulthood. For my final act of teenage angst, I adopted a woe-is-me character the week leading up to my birthday, almost reveling in the dread of the arbitrary end of my youth. When my parents asked if I wanted to do anything to celebrate, I gave disinterested responses.

And then, sitting at the kitchen table during those last few days of being 19, my mother told me she had booked a pilot lesson for me in Oakland. 

We drove together to a part of the Oakland Airport I had never seen before and met the instructor, barely older than I was, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. He claimed to have over a decade of experience, so at least one of us had achieved their goal of flying at age ten. My mother waited in the lobby while we traversed the airfield, passing dozens of planes that seemed to get tinier and tinier the further we walked. We finally arrived at a blue-striped Cessna with a cute propeller on its nose, smaller than the Subaru my mother and I had driven across the Richmond bridge to get there. Adorable, if not very confidence-inspiring. The sort of plane that looked like a scaled-up toy, the kind you see in cartoons, usually talking. Not the sort of thing you really comprehend as a vessel capable of supporting the air travel of two adults (newly two twenty-somethings!) But I suspended my disbelief in order to suspend myself in the air. 

Various checks had to be done before we could take off, a clipboard and a checklist of items that had to be verified and completed. I liked the clipboard. The clipboard was good. If anything, maybe not long enough. It suddenly struck me as strange that they’d let you fly a plane for just $200, a few forms, and a short waiver. Even if, as the twenty-something-year-old pilot instructor explained, this was technically supposed to be just the introductory lesson—the first in a long series of classes on the route to obtaining a pilot license. In theory, I was supposed to follow up and schedule more lessons, but it didn’t seem to bother my instructor that I was here as a one-off. He told me we would sit side-by-side the whole time, two steering controls each capable of maneuvering us through the air. Reasonable.

So maybe the thing that actually suddenly struck me as strange was that they made planes this small in the first place. This thing was a Mini Cooper with wings. 

I tried to pay attention as he explained all the dials and meters in the cockpit, the function of the various buttons and dashboards. But for today, all I really needed to know (and all I’d remember a year and a half later) was that pushing the yoke forward would tip the plane’s nose down, while pulling it back would point us up. The rest of the steering was straightforward: more or less left to go left, right to go right. 

We waited for our turn on the tarmac. My stomach dropped a little, the instructor’s voice garbled as it pitched through the headset, him spurting jargon I didn’t understand to someone on the other side. I pictured my mother’s uncle, two decades’ worth of warnings against the exact undertaking I was about to embark on. 

Turning 20 was the last thing on my mind. 

But whether you think about it or not, whether you want to or don’t, you turn. You turn—left onto the runway, and then you pull the yoke back, nose tipped to the air, engines firing. One way or another, you leave the ground.

Tiny as we were against an endless sky, I could feel every bump as turbulence rattled us across the East Bay, shaking with the plane at every gust of wind. Our path was in my hands, save for the moments when we drifted off course and the instructor gently nudged us in the right direction. 

Oakland is a good 45-minute drive from my house. More with traffic. By plane, that’s no distance at all. We flew over the San Francisco skyline, the iconic Salesforce Tower, the Transamerica Pyramid, made our way over to the shore, above the bridge—and to think I thought I’d already marveled at it from every possible angle. Across the water, I could spot the stretch of land where I knew my house must be one of the dots way down below. 

A shaky flight, yes. But a magnificent one. 

Shortly after I declined the instructor’s offer to do a flip, we began our return to Oakland and our descent to the ground. He handled the landing. My mom was there waiting once it was over. 

I haven’t dreaded a birthday since.