I left Paris on Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at precisely 11:36am when my flight left Charles De Gaulle Airport for Dublin. We were supposed to leave 1 hour 16 minutes earlier but were delayed by heavy fog.

The media narrative puts the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo 6 minutes earlier at 11:30, though some sources say “shortly after” or “around”, so no one seems entirely sure of the precise minute.

Even though it doesn’t matter one bit to my story, that lack of precision bothers me. Pinning it down feels important. Because I’m still wrapping my head around the literal fact that all hell broke loose in Paris at almost exactly the moment I left.

Depending on the truth of those few uncertain minutes, I was about to take off as the gunmen burst into Charlie Hebdo’s offices; or they did it just as we took off; or just after. The only truly important fact is that I was not there and didn’t know about it until I was somewhere over the northern Atlantic.

From there, the story I’ve been telling my friends, family and colleagues goes like this.

The sun rises late in Paris, so it was still dark when our Uber arrived and a friendly, smiling cabbie named Selim who spoke no English, loaded up our bags and carted us off through the dark and foggy streets of Paris to catch our flight. We noted our sadness that our last look at Paris was so obscured by the fog.

At the gate, my travel partner and I sat directly across from a TV tuned to France 24. There was plenty of news, none of it pleasant, but all of it far away, all of the standard CNN headline news that one sees in airports.

Our connection in Dublin was tight, so everyone rushed to catch their flights. Ireland has this nifty U.S. Customs Pre-Clearance station for Americans returning home, and we were hurried through. Everyone seemed on edge, though at the time I chalked it up to the connection being tight. There was one Customs Agent who seemed especially cranky. I’ve never had a Customs experience like that before. Mostly they barely look at me and roll their eyes when I tell them I have wine in my luggage. This guy was intense and I was a bit rattled by it.

It wasn’t until we reached cruising altitude over western Ireland and the flight crew turned on the in-flight wifi that I saw the Facebook comment from my sister. “Did you hear about the terrorist attack in Paris today? Lucky that you left already.”

I spent the rest of the flight and my iPad battery devouring every detail of what had happened, fielding messages from friends and family who were relieved that I was safe. “I’m so glad you’re not in France now,” my mother told me this weekend on the phone.

And that’s the entire story. There was no close call, no special knowledge, nothing newsworthy at all about it.

However.

While I’m warmed to know that so many people care so much for me as to express their relief that I’m back in Chicago, it wasn’t really a close call. I was never in any danger.

In fact, I half wish that I really was still in Paris.

Today’s rally in Paris was attended by world leaders including Angela Merkel and Benjamin Netanyahu, all of them in the crowd, symbolically walking down the street hand in hand. It was the largest public gathering France has seen since the end of World War II. I would have liked very much to be in that crowd today, in solidarity with the French people who were so kind and friendly to us throughout our trip. It feels like someone beat up my nicest friend and it sucks that I can’t be there to take care of them, help them heal.

If I have any hesitancy at all about being in Paris right now, it’s that those crowds surely clogged up the Metro something awful, so getting home would have been a complete nightmare, and to that I give a resounding “Meh.”

I am not afraid of being in Paris. With all of the heightened security, it’s a safer city today than it was at any point during my visit.

The truth is that a terrorist strike like this could easily happen in Chicago. It did happen in Boston. If I’m not afraid of Chicago or Boston, why would I be afraid of Paris?

What’s more, the attack was extremely targeted — cartoonists who openly thumbed their nose at a cultural taboo and a Jewish grocery. Neither of those was random. They weren’t interested in other potential targets. That much became clear when one of the brothers holed up in that printing warehouse gave a telephone interview in the middle of his hostage taking, repeatedly insisting that they do not kill women or children.

Whatever you think of that explanation, do not even think of taking it as a defense. It is not. Their actions were horrifying, disgusting, and as I understand it, wholly against the true spirit of Islam in every way conceivable. The loss of the Charlie Hebdo staff, the cops, the Jewish grocery shoppers, all of it is heartbreakingly tragic.

I am, however, pragmatic. I never set foot near either Charlie Hebdo’s offices or the kosher grocery, let alone any suburbs. Had I been there, at no point would I have been in any danger. This pragmatism keeps me from hyperventilating over imagined danger.

Let’s throw in some additional perspective since the media seems to think that the city in which I live and spend the vast majority of my time is the murder capital of the United States.

According to the FBI, as reported by CBS Chicago in July 2014, the murder rate in the Chicago metro area is about 7 per 100,000 residents. Within the city limits, it’s closer to 18 per 100,000. The national average is 4.7 per 100,000.

Per a 2013 report from the United Nations, as cited by Wikipedia, the murder rate in Paris is 1 per 100,000. The murder rate in Chicago is 18 times higher than Paris. And that’s after Chicago has made some strides in cutting it down.

Frankly, all of the statistics point to the idea that I’d be safer if I’d stayed in Paris, terrorists and all.

And yet, I’m not remotely afraid to be here in Chicago. I love it here. I’m a Chicago fan girl. I made the boneheaded tourist move of telling one of our tour guides that we have the best art museum in the world while standing just a few blocks away from the Louvre. When people in France learned I was from Chicago, I turned into a fucking city ambassador on the spot, waxing poetic about the food and the architecture before inevitably warning them off about visiting in the winter.

Chicago has it’s problems, of course, and like most “Western” cities, it’s concentrated in neighborhoods which I don’t generally have any reason to visit. Paris has its own trouble spots, and has reacted by creating 15 “Priority Security Zones” that have an increased police presence.

I can’t say that PSZ’s are a good thing since they’re highly controversial and seems to look a lot like racial profiling from what I can tell from the little reading I did on them, but it helps to illustrate my point: In any urban community, some neighborhoods are safer than others. It’s simply a fact of living in a city.

On the Fourth of July this past year, I was at home here in Chicago. I don’t remember much about what I did during daylight hours, but at dusk I was out in the neighborhood watching fireworks with friends. That weekend in Chicago, 13 people were killed and 58 more were wounded by gun violence. The differences between that and Charlie Hebdo are organization, ideology, and racial politics. The rest is just selective outrage.

But it still bothers me, the lack of precision on the Charlie Hebdo timeline. Because everything else about the story has been so precise. Because the way I deal with stuff like this is with relentless research. Because I want my story to be verifiably true, because if you can call one fact into question then the story unravels. Where was I when it happened? I can’t be certain. But whether I was on the ground or speeding down a runway or sailing above it, I do know I was in France.

Je suis Charlie, mais je suis Chicago.