What was I even looking at? The sky, maybe. I think I was looking at the sky. I must have been, I remember, because it was blue and full of those skeletal, wispy half-clouds. That’s what I was looking at. When my attention returned to the trail, she was gone. The only trace of her was her phone resting on the ground.

And that’s how she disappeared.

I wish there were more to the story. The search parties never found anything. She was there one second on the trail, overlooking a twenty-mile reach to the horizon, and then nowhere ever again. We looked and looked and looked, and sympathetic strangers formed search party upon search party, and news coverage, for weeks, and nothing. I don’t remember that time all that well. I remember being thoroughly questioned but not what I was asked. I remember the terror of the blackout, the new learned power of disassociation from my own body and experiences: how could I not have seen what had happened?

One thing I do remember thinking is that they weren’t going to find her. I didn’t tell anyone this, of course.

And I was right. No body or suspects. Like she had evaporated, mid-step, into the wispy clouds.

If I’ve learned anything from my write-ups it’s that people get lost in the woods all the time. Everyone thinks that they would never get lost, but when the forest is dense enough, and sometimes even when it isn’t, it’s near impossible to find your way back to a trail once you’re off it, even from barely ten yards away. I did a write-up once of a graduate student named Meredith Santos who was hiking with her boyfriend, then left the trail to pee. Boyfriend waited and waited. Hours he was there and Meredith never came out. She was reported missing, search parties combed the place, couldn’t find anything. Weeks later, hunters stumbled across the scene: a shoddy makeshift shelter, an attempted fire, and Meredith Santos in the early stages of decomposition, who had starved and succumbed to the elements after a month out in the wilderness. She’d simply gotten turned the wrong way, and when she realized she’d been walking for too long not to be back at the trail yet, she panicked, turned round again, and before you knew it she’d walked and walked so far that a deliberate search couldn’t even find her.

I think that this must be what happened to Celeste.

I think she went into the woods for some reason, lost her bearings, and couldn’t find her way back out.