In bed, I agonized over whether I would keep the promise I had made to myself the night before: that this morning, I would skip my scheduled sixty minutes of power yoga. I would not skimp on my usual breakfast of one-half of a cup of oats, one-third of a scoop of protein powder, one handful of blueberries, and one tablespoon of pumpkin seeds. I would add an entire half an avocado to the side salad in my lunch. I would spend the afternoon walking instead of running up the gargantuan hill that led to the horse pasture behind my apartment building. 

I had cooked up the promise at nine o’clock the night before, after I sucked a single square of chocolate and paced around my apartment, straightening cairns of books, second-guessing the lesson I’d planned for the next day, reconfiguring the wording of the email that I’d already sent to the mother of that student who critiqued my Creative Writing curriculum but had yet to attempt a single assignment. By then, I was finally tired enough to console myself.  

Catherine, I said. You haven’t slept more than five hours a night since the start of the school year. You can’t put a bobby pin in your hair without attracting attention to the blue-white, desolate field that is your scalp. You hover by the heaters, swaddle a fleece over your best blouses, and wear gloves while you scribble students’ ideas on your whiteboard. Your teeth ache. Your lumbar spine, low in bone density, screams every time you spend your two-minute savasana in a plank, growling at the instructor on the screen who tells you to “settle in.” You’re twenty-seven, and you’re already googling osteoporosis. Catherine, you don’t get a period. You haven’t in two years, not since before you ended your engagement to a man in Montana. You came to Vermont for reprieve; in Vermont, you said you’d allow yourself to rest.  

So, in the morning, I skipped yoga and told myself that today, I would live. 

But in the kitchen, I negotiated with breakfast. I would allow myself the oats, but did I really need the pumpkin seeds? What if I went without the protein powder? I would save at least seventy calories. Why was I so hungry, anyway? I hadn’t exercised that morning. I hadn’t carved out time for morning reading. I hadn’t written a gratitude list or a complimentary email to any of my students’ parents or done anything noteworthy with my day. 

I skipped the protein powder, asserting that the oats would sustain me until lunch. 

At school, I wasted half my prep period revising an email to a guidance counselor, wondering if I was being dismissive of the student who felt she didn’t belong in my class despite my multiple reassurances and consistent pausing of my lessons to console her while she cried in the hallway. I still had to review the short story I was teaching second period and check to see how many students were missing our most recent assignment and make copies and powerwalk to the water fountain to fill my Hydro-Flask. 

My face pinched. I glued my lips together, stifling the wheeze building in the back of my throat. I knew that by 10 a.m., my stomach would be screaming. My hollow head would search for things that I wrote in my lesson plan while I’d float from the floor to the whiteboard to the window, thinking back to earlier that morning, wondering if the protein powder would have saved the impending decay of my mind. 

I suspended in the center of my classroom, lost to time and to tasks that hadn’t yet arrived. I was too hungry to teach. I put in my notice later that week.  

*

Almost every school year, I taught Annie Dillard’s “The Death of a Moth” to juniors and seniors. It’s a hypnotic tale in which Dillard watches a spider spin her web in the corner of her otherwise immaculate bathroom, then hikes into the mountains of Virginia to camp and read Rimbaud, who made her want to be a writer when she was sixteen. At nighttime, while she reads, a moth flies into the flame of her candle, burns, and for two hours, acts as a wick, a “flame-faced virgin gone to God,” lighting her way back to Rimbaud’s poetry.¹

In the year before my hiatus from the profession, just two months before the debacle with the protein powder, I taught the text to my Creative Writing students, both to challenge their analytical abilities and give them permission to experiment. I wanted them to postulate the theme of Dillard’s piece, which ends enigmatically and has puzzled critics for decades; Dillard herself has said that out of the hundreds who have written about it, only one has really understood it. 

I’ve read the story dozens of times. I tell my students that while I don’t proclaim to be correct, I believe that Dillard’s pilgrimage to the woods achieved its purpose. Suspended in the candle’s wick, the moth becomes an ethereal martyr: her head, incinerated by the flame, is reduced to a “hole lost to time,” illuminating Rimbaud’s poems for two hours, while Dillard reads, “kindled,” as if to say, “awakened,” rebirthed as a writer. That’s why Dillard knows that the “hollow shreds” on the bathroom floor are moths; now that she’s been transfixed, she would know “what moths look like, in any state.”²

I proposed my theory to the class, and a few students agreed. Others didn’t.  

“Didn’t you say that Annie Dillard was newly divorced when she wrote this?”

Yes, I had said that. 

“So, I think she was just lonely.” 

“Maybe. But it’s more than that, right? She doesn’t seem lonely when she’s watching the moth burn, does she?”

“Honestly? I think that she had just gone crazy. Anyone who watches a moth burn like that for two hours is a sadist.” 

¹ Dillard, Annie. “The Death of a Moth,” Harper’s Magazine (May 1976): 26-27.

² Ibid.

I finished the school year in Vermont. I closed my gradebook, transferred my files from one Google Drive to the other. I sold my futon and my desk, and I shoved a box of books, notebooks, binders, and teacher mementos, reeking of pencil lead and peppermints, into the attic of my parents’ full-time home in Massachusetts. Then, I retreated to our place in Blair,³ a hamlet on Lake George in the southern Adirondack Mountains, which were, by then, being ravaged by gypsy moths. 

³ All names mentioned are pseudonyms.

*

As a child, I had the appetite of a bear. At one point, my mother joked that while most babies came out crying, I came out nibbling at my fingers. Sometime between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, eating became a compulsion. When I didn’t sleep through breakfast, I slurped Frosted Mini Wheats or slathered butter, sugar, and cinnamon on toast. My lunches were typical for public school; chicken patty on a bun, bagged potato chips, canned green beans, and sometimes, for an extra fifty cents, a chocolate éclair-flavored ice cream novelty. 

But after school, wolfish and alone, I bulldozed every box of crackers in the cupboards. Between my thumb and middle finger, I gripped sleeves of Oreo cookies. I drowned pasta in reheated meat sauce and smothered it with blankets of parmesan cheese. I made popcorn, frozen trays of lasagna, and boxed lava cakes. I baked cookies from store-bought dough and dressed hot chocolate with marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles. Later, at dinner, I ate two helpings, and sometimes, even after that, I snuck snacks—tortilla chips, cheese and crackers, chocolate-dipped biscotti cookies from Trader Joe’s. 

My mother, frustrated with my self-destruction, would scold me. “Stop eating!” 

But I couldn’t stop eating. In food, I was transfixed, held by its promise of sweet, reliable pleasure. If left alone, I would eat all day.   

I gained an inevitable thirty pounds, and of course, complained incessantly about my weight. I dismissed my mother’s advice that I start exercising and practice portion control. 

“I was just like you,” she’d say, in a desperate attempt to convince me that with discipline, a chubby adolescent can become a lean adult. Her comments encouraged my brother, Dennis, who enjoyed second helpings every night but went to the gym every day, to also offer advice. At dinnertime, their admonishments and warnings propelled me to my plate, where a mountain of au gratin potatoes would suffocate my hurt. Every afternoon, I continued to indulge in the solitary ecstasy of grazing the cupboards. 

In the summer of 2007, just after the seventh grade, I moved to Blair with just my dad, who preferred the quiet and had time off between finishing one job and starting another. My mother stayed in Massachusetts to work and came up only on weekends.

Blair is an insular place. From the front deck of my family’s raised ranch, pushed into the hill behind a creek called Sucker Brook, you can see the center of our summer community—pickleball courts, tennis courts, five holes of golf course, a grassy beach where we all learned to swim, and, at the bottom of Blair Road, a cluster of mailboxes, each adorned with the surnames of their respective cottages. 

The kid group of Blair was captained by an infamous family of blondes called the Garners.⁴ My mother was friends with their mother, and I’d grown up spending most afternoons at their house, a traditional waterfront Adirondack camp with cathedral ceilings and a u-shaped dock, where they kept a kaleidoscope of neon lake toys. Our cottage on Blair’s south side was small but sturdy, built by my Opa, a refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary, and it always smelled of paprika and fresh laundry. 

⁴ All names mentioned are pseudonyms.

The Garners had a daughter, Lauren, whose legs were long like string beans. I had a crush on her brother, Stevie, who I’d known was out of my league even at age five. My mother has the cheekbones of Heather Locklear. Combined with the genes of my stocky Armenian father and my incessant indulging, as a teen, I had a moon-face, which made my almond eyes look even tinier. To me, the Garner’s were of a different breed: Germanic, sharp, lean with natural athleticism. They drove golf carts from one end of Blair to the other, carting the rest of the brat pack, watermelon towels floating behind them like flags. My mother, incredulous and disappointed, declared that if the other kids were heading to the beach or up the hill to pick blackberries, I was to walk instead. 

Most years, the Garners made fun of a girl named Delaney, who was always heavy set; her mother was and still is an exceptional cook. But the summer I got fat offered novelty, and since I had grown particularly awkward and meek, electing to stuff my mouth instead of speak, I had, in the eyes of the young people in Blair, become repugnant.  

That summer, I babysat a little boy named Luke, whose older half-brother, Mason, had recently become Blair’s latest heartthrob. Sometime in mid-July, at bedtime, Luke brushed his teeth and changed into his racecar boxer pajamas. Lying in bed, he covered his face and confessed to what he’d overheard at the Garner’s earlier that day, when Mason had brought him along for an afternoon swim. 

“Lauren said something mean about you.” He giggled, red and embarrassed, celery-colored eyes hiding behind tiny hands. “She and all of the Garners—they all said mean things about you.” 

I didn’t have to ask him what those mean things were; my imagination would suffice. Later that night, after Luke’s dad drove me home in the golf cart, I lay in bed, my mountainous gut spilling over the crease of my shorts, and decided that from then on, I would be my own company. 

*

During the years that I was fat, which constituted most of my adolescence and drifted into my early twenties, I hid from annual Blair gatherings, which typically occur under a yellow-and-white striped tent erected on the flat part next to the tennis courts. I faked stomachaches and stayed at the house, where I plotted my rebirth—one day, I’d be skinnier, prettier, articulate, and elegant, married to a man who proved that I was lovable. My brother always invited me out with him, but if the Garners were involved, I’d say no. After a while, he stopped asking. When my mother came home from parties, she greeted me in the living room, glowing and sad. 

But I learned to make Blair my own when I started hiking Record Mountain. A towering structure on the north side of Blair, Record shields our community from the rest of northern Lake George. 

I have hiked the mountain nearly every day of every summer since 2017. By now, I know it like I know my own body, which I inspect in the mirror after my nightly shower, before I read alone in bed. The trail starts with a meandering pathway that weaves itself between the aspen trees, their leaves like bells twinkling in the wind. My mother likes to pretend that fairies live there. The trail steepens when you reach a staircase of rocks covered in moss, then dips to a dogwood tree, tagged with a blue circle by the Nature Conservancy. About a quarter of the way to the top, there’s a dry spot where a boulder juts out, inviting you to sit and contemplate if you want to continue. For some people, this is just enough. Halfway up the trail sits another cluster of anorthosite rock, offering a larger circumference of the same south-facing view. It’s a spot where most people take a break; it’s a spot where, if you linger too long, you just might be seen.

The trail snakes to the top with caution; you have to shimmy down a metamorphic elephant to a canopy of pines, which opens to the peak, where I usually stand with my back to Blair, wondering about the lone house in the bluffs to the west or the people in the car sauntering from Ticonderoga to Hague. 

I prefer to hike alone. 

Over the years, as I shrank in size, I gained a reputation for my daily hikes up Record. People in Blair knew that I spent September through June teaching at a rural school in Montana, that I’d fallen in love with a farmer who had an innate understanding of the imprinting power of landscape, a man who respected that for the rest of our lives, I would savor my summers in the Adirondacks. 

By the summer of 2020, the year I left Montana for good, my hikes and my size were the only evidence that I was even partially fulfilling the auspicious promises that I’d made to myself in adolescence. I stood at the mirror for hours, tracing my ribs, and on the mountain, I hit a personal record: fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds, from trailhead to peak. That August, I hiked with a Ziploc bag that I filled with blueberries from the bushes that huddled between the spruce trees. I added them to my morning oatmeal, which I savored in restrained bites, the berries’ tart flesh lubricating my tongue as I sat erect on our front deck, surveying the fossilized patterns of Blair, transcending time with my abstemiousness. 

*

In 2021, the summer after I decided to quit teaching, I found Record as barren as I was. The gypsy moths devoured every variety of tree: oak, maple, aspen, birch. They left the soil exposed and vulnerable to desiccation; without the cover of the leaves, the sun inhaled any rainfall before the soil could drink. Branches that once offered me shelter stood naked and bony. 

The clouds of brown moths above me were the same color as the whole-wheat pancakes I cooked for breakfast. I watched them eat while I filled my day with checklists, hikes, Pilates classes, emails to people I hoped would pay me one day—all the tasks that delayed my lunch, which I usually ate at four o’clock in the afternoon. The moths ate, while I ran up and down Record, calculating the calories I could burn in order to earn a square of chocolate after my dinner later that evening, a dinner that I’d already planned that morning, when, ravenous with the delay of my lunch, I took stock of all of the items in the fridge, the freezer, the lazy Susan, the bread basket. 

In “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf, in the way that only Virginia Woolf can, marvels at and pities the moth that flies by day. She observes that the “same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horse” seems also to send “the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane.”⁵ The moth can’t stop moving, as if “the enormous energy of the world” has been “thrust into his frail and diminutive body.”

⁵ Woolf, Virginia. “The Death of the Moth.” In The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate, 266. New York: First Anchor Books, 1995.

The moth is, according to Woolf, “little or nothing but life.” 

Gypsy moths fly by day. I knew that Virginia Woolf would pity them. I began to wonder if Virginia Woolf would also pity me. 

*

In the evenings while my dad snoozed on the couch, I sat in the dining room after an 8:30 dinner of mixed greens, chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, and quinoa, paired with an oil-free dressing and five blue corn tortilla chips. On my laptop, I watched videos made by women who had healed their hypothalamic amenorrhea—women who had lost their periods, gotten them back, and built careers helping others do the same. 

Sometimes, I felt that these women were speaking to me. They knew my personality; they knew of my allegiance to my exercise routine, my compulsion to count calories, my addiction to that sweet morsel of dopamine every time I checked something off my to-do list. Most of the women in the videos were athletes—ultramarathoners, cyclists, gymnasts, and dancers. Most of them had been skinny adolescents. Most of them claimed that I was afraid of losing control.  

In “Why Do I Fast?” Wole Soyinka, on a hunger strike in prison, opens his dishes and sniffs. “A fierce protest commences in the pit of [his] stomach,” which arms him “with the power of [his] veto.”⁶ Perhaps, denying his body’s dire demand is his grandest form of power. 

But then, Soyinka describes how he passes the time. He closes his eyes to a “universe of colors.” He holds the sunbursts, imagining that each particle of light is its own fiery planet in the galaxy. And then, he is transfixed, floating, dissipating among the very particles that he has been watching: “In the muting of sounds which overtakes the senses the mind drifts easily into transcendental moods, wiping out environment, reality, fragmenting slowly till it becomes one with specks of dust in ether.”⁷

⁶ Soyinka, Wole. “Why Do I Fast?” In The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate, 454. New York: First Anchor Books, 1995.

⁷ Ibid. 455

For Soyinka, fasting is euphoric; fasting is how we lose control. 

I perched at the table with my fork, my crumpled napkin, my ceramic plate encrusted with hot sauce. I was tempted to write to these women on YouTube, to thank them for recognizing that the culprit of my body’s decline was the ascetic for which I was often praised. But I also wanted to ask them if they’d ever read Soyinka. Hadn’t they ever found freedom in fasting? 

Instead, I washed my dishes. In the shower, I massaged my scalp, a vain attempt to activate the hair follicles that engaged in their own rebellion, while the greens, the chickpeas, and the chips rattled like coins in my stomach.  

*

Sometime in early August, after a day of vacillating between ritual and sanity, I set out for Record at 7:30 in the evening. I power-walked Blair Road, a domineering hill that cuts north from south. I heard and pretended not to glance at the moving figures at the center of what used to be the tennis courts, which had, since their renovation into pickleball courts, become the heartbeat of the community. I heard my mother’s triumphant howl, saw my dad’s rigid direction to Meg Olafson, who served with that awkward, but effective jerk of her long torso. A woman younger than I named Charlie lounged in the grass, wondering when Mason would ask her to marry him. 

I marched to Mosswood Way, where I turned left and followed the gravel road to the trailhead. In a normal year, the mountain trail at that time of evening should have been a gaping trachea of mosquitoes, staving off visitors with its foreboding drum of indecipherable mammal feet crushing leaves. That year, the woods were too thin to house such activity; the moths had devoured the foliage that had for decades ensconced her with vitality, leaving Record an emaciated, haunted structure that made everyone uneasy. But for me, their destruction offered an alibi. I couldn’t go to the pickleball courts or the porch gathering where someone might see me because by that point, even nearing 8:00 at night, I and Record had already agreed to show up for one another. The moths made sure that we could both keep our promise.   

The whole way up, I listened to paddles hitting pickleballs, the echoes of Blair’s latest ritual. At the top, I did a plank and counted to one hundred. On the way back down, as I passed the south-facing view spot and rounded the bend to the last descent, my own footsteps were the only sounds to punctuate my journey. Now, I could go home the way I preferred to—right on Mosswood Way, down the hill, and left to the Big Beach, then up another little hill, which passes the pickleball courts. By the time I reached them, they would be empty. 

I preferred to go home this way because I could walk between the golf course and the lake, a sprawling arena of iridescence enclosed by Blair’s menagerie of shingled summer camps. This was my assurance: people enjoying their late dinners on the front porch would see me, they would know who I was, and they would know that I was still here, that I still loved Blair, even as I remained masked by twilight, a ghost who could exist here as a figure that eluded everyone. Ever since I had gotten skinny—ever since I had stopped devouring everything in sight but instead devoured my day by calculating my meals and moving without stopping—I relished evenings like these, when I could be seen and unseen at the same time.  

But as I walked up the smaller hill, the sinking sun bursting behind the roof of a neighbor’s house, I saw, out of my left peripheries, a familiar figure in fuchsia. It was Charlie, a girl with youthful skin and a square jaw from Crown Point, a girl with whom Mason had fallen in love because she cooked for him and worked in social work and was beautiful because she simply wanted everyone to feel included. Blair had absorbed her with gusto. 

“Catherine!” she greeted. I pretended not to hear while she jogged to meet me. “Catherine!” 

We met in the clearing beside the road, she in a sweatshirt and shorts, and I rocking between my feet.  

“Just finished your hike?” 

“Sure did.”  

“You never skip out on that, do you?” 

“I can’t.” I forced a chuckle. 

“Hey, I just wanted to let you know that you’re always welcome over at our place.” 

“Thank you. That’s very kind.”  

“Like, the other night, we invited your brother over, and your mom said that we should invite you. I hope you know that we want you to come over, too.” Usually, if Mason was having people over, the Garners came, too, and Charlie was always a gracious hostess, fetching ice for everyone’s drinks and setting out bowls of salsa on the coffee table. I’d already decided that I had nothing in common with her.  

“Or, like, the other day,” she continued. “You were doing yoga on the dock, and Mason and I were on the boat, and he was like, ‘Should we go over there?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. She looks pretty in the zone.’” 

I remember that day. I had been matching my breath to the beats of my chaturangas and virabhadrasanas when I saw Charlie on their dock with a cooler and heard the gurgle of the Donzi, Mason’s favorite lake toy. I felt her step onto the boat while Mason unwound the last of the ties from the dock-post; I heard him shift it into gear. As they got closer, I willed myself to stop. Catherine, pause your practice. Stop moving, at least long enough to wave when they drive by. What could be bad about saying hello to them? A few things: they could cease to wave back, because they really didn’t see me; they could pretend not to see me because they didn’t really want to talk to me; they could wave but quietly agree not to stop and talk to me; or, they could stop and talk to me, but with obvious reluctance. All were scenarios I relived from an adolescence marked by Blair’s brand of rejection, which had driven me, like other recluses in our hamlet, to a life of solitude. I had decided, then, that it was better not to say anything, to stay with my chaturangas and asanas and bakasanas and eka pada koundinyasas—the movements that bought me the right to enjoy the vegan burger that I would panfry for dinner that night. And now, here was Charlie, wondering why I never came out with any of the other kids my age. 

“That’s really sweet of you, Charlie. Sorry I didn’t say hi. I was just focused on my workout.” 

Charlie’s lips slackened, her gaze communicating a combination of disbelief and concern. She knew that I was lying. 

“Truthfully, growing up here was rough on me. The Garners—I’ve just never fit in here. I don’t like having to worry about what mean thing they’re going to say to me.”  

The confession felt like a purge. I was embarrassed, but relieved. 

“I know how Lauren can be,” she said. We stood there, Blair’s aromas of grass, golf cart exhaust, and grilled steaks wafting between us. 

“Well, your mom mentioned that you’d like to hang out.”

Of course she had. My mother knew that I was lonely. I, who by the age of twenty-seven, had failed at my engagement, failed at teaching, and slumped back to Blair to wallow about a love and a life eschewed, was still a child for whom she needed to advocate. Someone needed to be friends with me so that I would finally act as if I had grown up here, so that I would finally act like a grown-up myself.  

“I hope you know that we’d like you to hang out,” Charlie said. “We love you.”

Charlie and I hugged goodbye. I cried on the walk home. My adolescent ignominy had driven me to hike; now, my drive to hike had become my saboteur. That summer, I had chosen to be among the moths so much that I had become one, adept only at moving, eating, and burning through Record Mountain while I burned myself out in solitude. 

*

The year I quit teaching, the moths ate everything in sight: the cluster of dogwoods that bordered the tennis courts and the golf course, the maples that offered the perfect portion of shade to the raspberry bushes on Mosswood Way. They conferenced in clusters next to our wood pile, and they fluttered about the canopies of branches that line Sucker Brook. 

Annie Dillard concludes her essay with a rumination on loneliness. She doesn’t mind living alone. She likes eating alone and reading, and she only feels lonely when something is funny. I also do not mind being alone. Like Dillard, I like eating alone. Usually, I like hiking alone. But by the end of the summer, I’d learned that the moths were terrible company.  

Charlie and I are still getting to know one another. I’m still not convinced that we have enough in common to be close friends. But it was her assurance that she wanted me around, that she liked me and meant it when she invited me to things, that prompted me to finally take a few days away from Record. Instead, I sat on the deck, glaring at the bare exposures in the mountain’s fur while my pancakes digested, unperturbed. A week later, I got my first period in thirty months.