cherryblossomflavoredsoap

[cherryblossomflavoredsoap]

I think my lab is haunted

Not lab as in the dog breed, let's clarify.

I think a common experience for a STEM student is that feeling of being watched. Everyone around you is interested in your success, only because they need to know who to look out for when medical school applications roll around, but this is a different kind of "feeling watched". When you're truly alone, well you and your prokaryotes, and at the edge of the room where the threshold is lined with that high-vis, yellow/black tape, you see shadows. Or, I suppose, a shadow. You know intrinsically it's the same one, though you're unsure why.

It always tries to pass the tape, but like ants in ink it cannot. It doesn't do anything, just sits there until it's invisible, then it will lurch forward again. This tape, rising the smallest fraction of an inch above the polished concrete floors, is too high of a hurdle to jump. A barrier. And as such it cannot leave.

You feel chills, as I'm certain you would, each time you walk over the tape, a task too impossible for the spectre. You know nothing of it, only speculations you think you're crazy for having, and concluded it was a girl. She had to have been a year or two older than you, and you picture her being blond, though you obviously don't see her. She's peaceful, despite her disposition, almost shy. She does nothing more than try to reach the door. As is common in a lab, you hear odd sounds every which way. The creaking of equipment, the crackling of a freezer, and the most prominent is the airy hum of the incubators, where your little green friends sit to give you company, though you know for certain none of this is her.

The flow hood-- not to be confused with the fume hood, which is a common mistake that peeves your instructor to the point of tangents-- needs to be sterilized. Your prokaryotes are autotrophs, but the other groups you share the space with have heterotrophs, and you want them to not kill your colonies. The other groups run one cycle, fifteen minutes, but your group runs three. So, for forty five minutes until your lab partner arrives, you are alone here with her.

It's a hot summer's day, as they often are in August. This is the hottest month afterall. A fifteen minute walk across campus is nothing short of torture, and the only way I can truly describe the heat is to ask if you've ever experienced it. If not, go to Arizona in mid August. Or don't, if you're not used to it like I am you could very well end up in the ER and that sounds like a legal issue for me. This day there is a high UV warning, and you can truly feel it. At a certain point, heat doesn't feel hot; it simply burns. It burns the tips of your ears and the tops of your cheeks, but aside from the sweating you can't truly say you feel hot. You never realize that burning is a different feeling altogether from heat, not until you live it.

But still, proper lab attire outside of your coat is pants and shoes. You wear the lightest pants, hoping those will do, but it's still too much. Even nakedness would be, though, as so long as you can feel the heat, it will boil you.

Regardless.

The lab itself is cool, so despite its occupied nature it does offer respite. You bemoan to the bacteria about the heat. They don't respond as they don't tend to, and you complain once more as you sit to catch up on work during your forty five minutes.

There it is again. In the corner, did you see it? But as it does, you turn your head and the shadows vanish. The apparition is gone, never was there, really, you just hate being alone. But, you stop mumbling to yourself now, as you worry she heard. Though she couldn't tell a living peer about it, it was embarrassing. You, talking to yourself. But the feeling runs down your spine like pin pricks or the legs of a spider. Despite still sweating from the heat, you shiver.

Homeostasis is a funny thing, really. You recall stories of people freezing to death, those found unprepared on Mt. Everest, buried in snow with whatever cloth stripped and tossed aside. They say that in a last ditch effort to warm up, the body will forget it's cold in a way, warming until it feels hot. The climber will start to sweat, wondering why they were ever shivering in the first place, but most were never told that they should stay uncomfortable. Many will undress. This is when they die, the frost biting their ungloved fingers, fingers which they hadn't felt for meters yet, and soon the sweat will freeze in droplets on their arms. The drops will kill the skin, blackening like dried ink ans smelling most foul. The sun shining off the snow will burn newly-exposed flesh, even into their scleras, as the white of the snow is the color that reflects the most light. The climber will think of summer, lazing by the pool with reddened shoulders dotted with some combination of sweat, salt, and chlorine, and they will reach for the snow to melt it with solid hands, trying to rub the water across their arms to cool their skin. But it is already cool, far too cool, and before long consciousness is lost. Folks say they'd rather freeze than burn, but little do they realize: death by both feels the same.

The UV light on the hood clicks off and you stand to turn it back on, careful to avoid the door and its tape, walking around the counters instead of past the threshold. As you walk back to your work your knees ache. You have always had such issues, growing pains the doctors would say, but none of your siblings had them and even after reaching full height you still hurt. Just as you sit down the shadow materializes again, and for some odd reason you feel bad.

They say that if a ghost was not ready to die it will haunt its place of death. Perhaps this is true. Despite having young people you would be naive to say there wasn's a chance someone of death on a college campus. You imagine this is a demographic too unprepared for death. But how upsetting it must be, truly. You think of her, what she might have been.

Medicine has been your passion since you learned it was something you could do. Throughout your life you have seen all the male doctors, the male scientists, I mean, God, you were raised on Bill Nye, and if you are a man you might have felt inspired by them, but if you are not, there was a tough battle ahead. Your peers, the male ones, would look at you funny for contributing your knowledge, but in any case being a woman means listening. A woman who gives others her knowledge is one who is too stuck-up. You think you're better than them because you know more? You shouldn't talk anyway. You would sit in biology, joining their conversation about simple Mendelian genetics, and they smirk.

"Right, you're the smart one," they will say in tones with hints of truth mixed with annoyance. They believe you're right, but they think you're trying to be a know-it-all. Often even if you're right, there's a good chance they try to correct you anyway, or they try to catch you on a fallacy or slight error. What is a woman if less intelligent?

But this ghost was one. And if you are a woman, shoes which I am putting you in, your heart breaks for her. All the strife, all the ignorance, the fight to be heard and not just seen, to be something many don't think you're capable of, just to pass before you reach it. To be told that you could never be a doctor and be proven right, because the end of your story was premature. How that must ache. And suddenly you feel bad for complaining, because to hurt in life is miniscule. She cannot hurt, cannot burn, at least not physically, but her presense is a manifestation of her termoil. Her body is dead, but her spirit burns with a passion stronger than any desert sun.

To hurt is to live. To be alive.

If you were her, you would kill for the aching knees and the disabling cramps,

Stomach, limb, or uterine.

Because, at least, you still have a chance.

Because with each cycle, each limped step, each drop of sweat, you get closer to your goal.

So you live. Not for yourself nor for her. Not to prove others wrong, nor to prove yourself right. You don't live for living or dead. You live. Simply to live. Because to experience, to feel or hurt or laugh, is fleeting.

And as it is fleeting, there's value. Because if it is finite, why refuse the little you have?

[cherryblossomflavoredsoap]

I work at a gun range and gun powder is, what do you know, flammable. Our pistol bay caught fire— pretty minor but it lasted a tad longer than normal— and over the radio, without thinking, I say: “there’s a fire in pistol, question mark?”

love saying "question mark?" out loud when I'm talking about something i'm unsure of