Before I moved to Colorado from North Carolina, I made a pit stop in Ohio to see my parents—a Midwest reality check of steel mills and gray skies, in between oceans and mountains. I was sitting at a bar in Cleveland, trying to read, when two young drunk girls insisted on buying me drinks. Then one of them leaned over and said, "The thing is, you can totalllly lose weight."

I smiled tightly.

"I'm a personal trainer. I'll tell you what to do," she slurred. "I mean, you're just sooo pretty."

"The thing is," I replied, "I'm healthy. I eat well. I'm, like, climbing a mountain in a month."

"Ooh, good for you." She laid her head down on the bar. I left and called the friend waiting for me in Colorado to tell her we had plans. What I'm saying is, I decided to climb a mountain out of spite.

I have been fat my whole life. Growing up in Ohio, I found my confidence in perfect outfits, great hair, good eyeliner. Consequently, I never learned to be comfortable sweating in public. I never overcame the shame of looking like a hairless drowned rat at the gym.

Living in North Carolina broke me of that insecurity. Going to the beach every day, I got used to sweat and sticky sand. And there was too much sunshine, too much beauty, to care about what my body looked like. However, once I was standing at the bottom of the 7,255-foot Horsetooth peak in the Front Range, my newly sun-kissed confidence waned. I was properly scared of the mountain, whose trails were populated with ripped Colorado warriors.

A mountain remains unknowable until you're on it, but fear is an appropriate response to Horsetooth Mountain. The massive, cracked red rock that sits atop it, according to Native American legend, is the broken heart of a giant who once guarded the valley below. A starving tribe seeking to hunt the animals that the giant protected plunged an ax through his heart, turning the soil red and his blood-drained heart into stone. I had visions of burst varicose veins, my lungs giving out, my legs failing, and hot rock climbers laughing at my corpse. Here is a list of things I worried about once I was actually on the mountain: none of the above.

Walk and breathe. Walk and breathe. My friend, a regular hiker, was familiar with Horsetooth, so she and the dog ran ahead to wait in spots of shade as I trudged up the trail. I let groups pass me, smiling hello because the altitude had stolen my voice. The bright June sun beat down on my shoulders, evaporating sweat into salty resin. I couldn't give two pennies what people thought of me.

The first thing I noticed as my head started to clear from the blind exertion of that first mile was the dirt shining. Milky quartz and silver mica streaked across the rocks and coated the ground like tinsel. That glittery trail under the late-morning sun took me back to the first time I went skinny-dipping in the ocean's bioluminescence, the way the plankton lit up under my feet in the sand.

You can't care about looking fat when you're swimming in stars, and you can't care about it when you're climbing them into the sky. As we continued up, people who'd passed me were coming down, and they stopped to tell us how close we really were, how beautiful it was up there. Nobody wants to make fun of you on a mountain no matter how you look. They just want everyone to get to the top.

To summit the giant's broken heart, there's a steep scramble over boulders and loose gravel, so I stopped. I just knew, deep in my own pumping heart, that getting down would be too painful, that I didn't have the oxygen. My partner passed no judgment.

"It's basically the top," she said, and I chose to believe her, because I already knew I would climb the mountain again.

This article appeared in the September/October 2019 edition with the headline "Heart of a Giant."