“The Aspirations of a Moth”
The summer after third grade was the summer of church camp—ticks, Bible studies in the woods, creek stomping, camp songs, friendship bracelets. It was the summer I swore I was possessed by a demon while I lay on the bottom bunk in the Robin cabin, sticky with Tennessee heat, but that’s not even the most memorable part of those days. No, the most lasting impression that summer left on me was the birth of my irrational fear.
The site of the inception is as fitting as any for an irrational fear: the girls’ bathroom, a place of mold and forgotten shower shoes and air stinging with bug spray and sunscreen. The bathrooms sat across from the rickety cabins scattered along a gravel path. Inside the bathhouse were creaky stalls and tile floors. The fluorescent lights hissed and crackled, and their yellowing plastic shells were shadowed by the corpses of bugs, little Icaruses victimized by the inviting glow that had fried them.
One night, I was getting ready for bed with the other girls in my cabin. Toothpaste and toothbrush in hand, I elbowed my way to an open sink. My hand gripped the rusted faucet handle and I looked into the sink to see a dead moth. In morbid fascination, my eyes traced the little corpse perfectly staged in its porcelain casket, its legs crumpled against its fat, fuzzy body and its powdery wings splayed outwards in death—open, vulnerable, fragile. I noticed the moth was large, too big to be washed down the drain.
With a flick of my wrist, I turned on the faucet.
The moth exploded, vanilla pudding oozing from its torso. Stricken, I stared at the desecrated corpse before I flinched away and shuffled to another sink. When I lay in bed that night, the moth in the sink, gooey and mangled, flitted behind my eyelids over and over until the moment was seared into my memory.
Moth. Water. Pudding. Repeat.
Now, I can’t handle being near a moth or even looking at one. If one is in the house, I can’t sleep. Big or small, they disgust me. I don’t even know the technical term for my phobia because I refuse to Google it for fear a picture of a moth will pop up. Even the word is gross: moth. It’s soft on the tongue, like a powdery thorax resting in your mouth. Just thinking about moths makes me feel like one is going to lodge itself in my throat where it will stay, trembling and writhing, suffocating me.
It could be worse. I could have an irrational fear of doorknobs or bread or paperclips which would make my life much more difficult than a fear of moths. People always ask why I’m afraid of moths and not something more dangerous, like snakes or spiders, but that’s the point—it’s an irrational fear, so I don’t know why. Moths aren’t harmful or aggressive or dangerous. They’re just there, passive participants of my fear. The worst part is that my fear of moths oozes into the rest of my life so that I’m constantly reminded of my phobia.
Things that freak me out:
1. The Silence of the Lambs. Not the cannibalism or skin suits—the moths.
2. Butterflies, because they remind me of moths.
3. The SpongeBob episode about a butterfly, specifically the moments when a real butterfly’s face pops onto the screen, buzzing and blech.
4. Cocoons, because of a story from my mom’s youth. My granddad brought home a large cocoon he found in the woods and put it in the living room for decoration. A few days later, my mom walked into the living room to find the cocoon split open and a giant moth clinging to the drapes.
5. Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth” and Annie Dillard’s “The Death of a Moth” for obvious reasons. Woolf’s essay isn’t that bad even though I have to imagine the moth flying around the window pane and slowly dying, but Dillard’s is cruel. Her descriptions of the giant moth crackling and writhing in a candle are so vivid that I think she scarred a part of my psyche.
But why this? I doubt that my fear of moths comes down to just the moths itself because that’s too simple, and I like a challenge. But how does someone uncover the underlying truth of an irrational fear without paying a psychiatrist? Once, I wanted to test my fear, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at pictures of moths or go on the hunt for one to do exposure therapy. Instead I sat down and watched Mothra because somehow in my delusion I convinced myself that it was the best way to face my fear. Mothra is a Japanese monster movie from 1961 that’s pretty much my worst fear: a giant, invincible moth attacking people. I illegally streamed it online, because four dollars is a steep price for a movie rental and inevitable nightmares. Mothra doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the movie, and it’s a giant larva until there’s fifteen minutes left in the film when it bursts from a cocoon as the physical, 1960s low-budget movie version of my fear incarnate. Honestly, I’d rather fight King Kong or Godzilla over Mothra, because the thing is indestructible—even when it’s a larva, battleships and helicopters and tanks can’t scratch it. Eventually, after leaving a path of destruction, the larva makes a cocoon and the real fire power comes out.
Fry that bitch, I thought as a giant ray gun is finally used to burn Mothra’s cocoon like Annie Dillard’s moth in a candle. But of course, since it’s a monster movie, five minutes later Mothra bursts from the cocoon as its fully-evolved, moth-monster incarnation and resumes its reign of terror. Yeah, you’re gonna need a lot more than mothballs and laser guns to deter this thing. To be honest, Mothra wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be, with its colorful body and glittering eyes rendered with the best monster movie special effects of its time—which is to say, it looks like a naturalistic Muppet. Still, it wasn’t comforting, mostly due to my imagining it as a real moth without the vibrancy and invincibility. At least all of the panicked Japanese citizens demonstrated the right reaction to a moth: running, screaming, and panicking, which is pretty much what I do whenever I encounter one.
Here is the story of one of those times. When I was a kid, every couple of months my mom rounded up my brothers and I to get our hair cut. The hairdresser’s was in an old strip mall behind a gas station and looked like a single gust of Mothra’s wings would topple the whole vinyl-sided structure. The salon had the characteristic sharp scent of hairspray, wet hair, nail polish, and cheap perfume. While I waited, I spent my time flipping through old style books from the 70s and 80s and staring at the painting of a woman leaning over a sink, smearing lipstick on her pursed lips as she preened into a fogged mirror.
One day, my hairdresser’s son found a dead moth. It was disintegrating and sun-bleached from where it had died behind the glass of the door, a death probably akin to that of the moth in Woolf’s essay. Moth corpse dissolving in the boy’s cupped hands, he chased me around the salon, past the oblivious woman in the painting and the rack of ancient hairstyle books. The ladies on the covers smirked at my predicament from underneath their shoulder pads and perms as I was pursued.
“Mom, make him stop!” I shrieked as I ran past, down the hall, and then back again with the boy gleefully chasing after me, his giggles as sharp as the cold edge of the scissors that had ghosted against my neck earlier.
My mom glanced up from her magazine.
“If you stop acting scared, he won’t chase you with it.”
But how could I act unafraid when it was there, all crumpled and mangled and gray and decayed? He cornered me, held the moth up to my face as I cringed in horror, then placed it on my head. I screamed and shook it off, the moth powder dusting my freshly cut hair.
The moth exploding in the sink, the dying moths in both essays, the moth in my hair—maybe it’s not the actual moth that freaks me out, but its death, its fragility. One second it’s a living being, the next a pile of dust. I don’t even like killing moths because I won’t want to be faced with disposing an oozing, crumbling corpse, which is worse than the moth being alive. What scares me in both of the essays aren’t the moths, but the descriptions of their deaths. Both moths were so vivid, so alive, and then one wasted away in a window pane while the other burned brightly for a single flicker of a moment, both only immortalized through the perception of someone else. Standing underneath shadowy constellations of dead bugs in the fluorescent lights of the camp bathhouse and persuaded by a morbid fascination, I turned on the faucet—then recoiled from my hand in the devastation, at how easy and instant it was.
Maybe my irrational fear is veiling a rational one: I’m scared how delicate my future is, how easily I fall short of my aspirations, how I could spend years waiting and planning and then—poof!—crumble from existence before making my aspirations tangible. Like moths, I am fragile and diminutive and unassuming. So are the little flickers of dreams, of passions, that ensnare my mind, harmless unless they drag me too close and I’m burned by my unrealistic expectations. And these self-imposed standards are an inferno; I pour my energy into daydreams and wishes of what I want to accomplish instead of making them tangible. Then the wildfire of this wishing, too bright, too untouchable, scares me. I spend my days bumbling around, too scared to draw closer to my aspirations for fear that I’ll fail and crumple underneath my guilt. I hover around the edges of the light because I want to be there, there, in the daydream halcyon blaze of what I aspire to do, to be. The anxiety of what I could have accomplished by now paralyzes me, so I don’t move, but I stare into the light, squinting eyes blinking away tears.
What if I never reach my full potential and waste away in the dim yellow glow of what could have been? How will I know I’ve drawn too close to the flame in the pursuit of my calling until my wings are singed and I’m crumpled on the floor, waiting to be swept up? What if my greatest accomplishment is a flash of light, of glory, and I’ll live in its shadow until I die?
It’s a deadly chiaroscuro, this dilemma.
I’m caught in a suffocating, fluttering mass of wings and antennae and abdomens swarming towards the flames.. I can cling to the fringes of the mob, struggling and separated from my passion by a windowpane of fear. Or I can throw myself into the writhing current, unable to see the light save for fleeting flickers through quivering wings until I break free into the center, throw myself into the radiance—a brief spark, consuming blaze, and then darkness.
But maybe pinning myself to a wall and doing this deep, melodramatic introspection is my trying to rationalize the irrational. Maybe I fear moths simply because of how gross they are. Maybe I don’t have a calling. Maybe I’ll end up chasing inconsequential, unreachable passions until I burn out. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll smother my fear of failure, and my passions won’t extinguish me.
I think it’s more likely that I’ll overcome my phobia of moths, and I expect to take that to my grave.
