Studies in Microscopy
I was afraid of cockroaches until I looked at one underneath my microscope. Dialing the lens, my sight spun in and out of focus over a rough, brown landscape. Strange, unidentifiable details came into clarity—a dark canyon, a curving river. What was a cockroach, really, but unknown terrain, a world of cells and exoskeleton?
I began to use my microscope to look at everything that frightened me. Of course, I had bigger, better ones in my laboratory, but there was comfort in having one at home. When my W2 came in the mail, I slid the paper under the lens, pressed my eye into the dark tunnel of the eyepiece, and, as if I were skydiving, fell through unfocused haze into a view of rough, fibrous grassland. A woven nest to huddle in. I could be a young bird, flying high for the first time, heading home. I saw no more words, no more confusing fields to fill or money I didn’t have. I was in the sky of another world and it wasn’t scary anymore.
When I called to tell my ma that no, I wouldn’t go on a date with our family friend’s son, Jason Wang, and I would not go on any dates with any boys, ever, I slipped my phone onto the plate, put my cheek up against the cool hardness of the eyepiece, and saw a neon field of red, blue, and green arranged neatly like tombstones, a plain of ordered light. After the call, I collected my tears onto a slide and watched fracturing crystals form an unknown cityscape. I wanted to slip through the eyepiece, run through those mysterious streets. I wondered what it would be like to look at my ma’s frown. What landscape would be revealed—fertile riverbeds, a striped red dawn, rows of fuchsia flowers? Some place safe and pretty, where I could lie down a while?
I went to a lesbian bar, my first. I’d passed it before on the sidewalk at least twenty times, faltering at the last moment. I was a shadow in a dark corner, cast against the wall. I didn’t move until a woman paused beside me. She rested a hand on my shoulder. Then she was gone. At home, I threw my shirt onto the microscope plate, crawled along its soft, looping chains, a net that had always held me, searching for an invasion, searching for what she had left behind. I found nothing.
I had a photograph of my mother from when she was young, my age. Wearing a scarf with her head tipped up, as if hopeful to see something just over the horizon. I slid it under my lens. I couldn’t tell where I’d landed. It could have been her hair, her scarf, her sweater. I saw dark wavering lines. I walked along them for a while like roads. But as long as I walked, I never found what I looked for: the things her own mother had said to her, the things that had made her cry. The things she hadn’t known how to explain.
When the first woman asked if she could come home with me, slipping her hand into mine, I wanted to soar over the ancient desert canyons in her palms. What if I traversed the volcanic ridges of her dark hair, instead of bringing her upstairs, panting from the slight effort, our clasped hands slippery? What cities did her sweat contain? What if, as she laughed on my couch, I slid down the glaciers of her teeth, rather than looked at her, her dangerous terrain I couldn’t blur with a turn of my hand? What if I first looked at a swab of her cheek—just to know. Instead of this kiss that fell towards me. There was too much to examine. A whole world to run through and survey. Mountains. Rivers. Deserts. Ruins. Everything that hid within, that could make me afraid. Then her lips were on mine, a soft landing. And I saw what was there.
Samantha Xiao Cody (@SamXiaoCody) is a queer, half-Chinese writer with degrees in Physics and Creative Writing from Princeton University. She has work published in Jellyfish Review and 3Elements Review and is a prose reader for The Adroit Journal. She currently lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she teaches math and physics at a project-based-learning high school.