About the Time I Was Almost Murdered (By a Moth)
I’ve survived bad breakups. I’ve lived alone. I’ve assembled IKEA furniture without crying.
I’ve even calmly pretended to understand what a mutual fund is (I don’t).
But nothing in my 35 years on this planet prepared me for the night I almost met my maker via moth.
Let’s set the scene, shall we?
It’s 11:43 PM. I’m in bed, freshly showered, slathered in overpriced night creams I can’t pronounce, watching a TikTok therapist explain how maybe you’re not dramatic, maybe you’re just in survival mode. Relatable. My dog is snoring. One cat is on my head watching my phone. The other one is mad at me, somewhere under the couch (I refused to let her scratch the curtains - sue me!).
Then I hear it.
The telltale sound of evil in flight: a dry, flappy, chaotic flutter.
There is a moth. In. My. Apartment.
Now, you don’t know me, you don’t know my name, my face, my life. But I will share one thing with you: I am terrified of bugs. Specifically the ones that fly. I will burn a house down. I will crash my car. I will jump off a ledge. But I will try to avoid a bug at any cost.
At first, I try to be brave. I am a grown woman, for fuck’s sake. I pay rent. I have a retirement savings account. I have survived 37 consecutive Sundays of doom.
“This is fine, I am fine,” I tell myself.
But then the moth dive-bombs me like it’s been sent by an ancient curse. And hey, I just came back from Egypt, so you never know.
It brushes my arm. Ugh.
I scream. I get out of bed faster than I’ve ever moved in my life.
I knock over my water bottle, the cellphone, and my sense of safety. My dog, bless him, blinks twice and goes right back to sleep - he knows any chaotic drama coming from me is not worth his time. My cats? Useless. One watched. The other ran. Cowards.
I grab the nearest weapon: a chancla — as tradition demands.
What happens next is hard to explain. It’s part exorcism, part interpretive dance, part emotional breakdown. I swat (and sweat), scream, crouch, yell, cry-laugh. I beg:
“Please just go back to hell!”
“This is my home!”
“I’m not emotionally stable enough for this!!”
At one point I genuinely consider calling someone. Not for help — just so someone can hear my final words: “Tell my pets I loved them.”
Eventually, the moth disappears. I don’t kill it. I lose it. It vanishes behind a curtain or into the void or maybe ascends to deliver a report to the Moth Elders. I don’t know; but it’s out of sight.
I try to sleep. I clutch my dog like a teddy bear (he hates it) and I text my best friend, “I was almost murdered.” She replies, “Again?”
Did I technically almost die? No. Probably. Still unclear.
But for someone with anxiety — the kind that sometimes knocks the wind out of you in the middle of a completely normal Tuesday — the line between “everything’s fine” and “I am dying” gets real blurry, real fast.
And that night, with a moth zigzagging toward my face like a tiny agent of chaos, I felt it.
That same little spike of panic. The jolt.
The weird floaty feeling where you ask yourself: Am I okay? Am I safe? Am I... dying?
There’s an old belief that moths symbolize death. Transitions. The in-between.
I think about that sometimes.
How something so small and ridiculous can still trigger that deep fear.
How we live with it.
How we laugh at it.
How we survive it.
So yeah — I didn’t die that night.
But I had a moment with mortality…and a chancla.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
In the end, the moth wasn’t the real threat. It was the way it made me feel — small, helpless, totally unhinged (okay that last part can’t really be blamed on the moth). And sure, maybe that’s dramatic, but so am I. The truth is, moths will always exist. Chaos will flap into our lives at 11:43 PM, uninvited and dusty. But fear? That part’s mine. I get to choose what to do with it. Whether I scream, fight, freeze, or grab a chancla, the moth doesn't control my emotions — I do. Which is comforting… until the next one shows up. Then all bets are off.
