How to Photograph a Tree

The tree series continues. Find the whole series here.

I found a cockroach in my bathroom.

It skittered under the counter before I could react. In that moment, the only thing more unnerving to me than the cockroach was that I heard, and now, even worse, I remember the sound of its tiny legs frantically drumming across my cabinet door.

Encountering a cockroach - especially inside - forces a zen-like awareness out of you because of its size and erratic movements. Other smaller bugs allow you to ignore their uncomfortable characteristics. Ants are just dots on the ground. Bees are little more than circles hovering around flowers. Even a spider in its web maintains a fragile beauty.

You can’t say the same about Periplaneta americana. A morbid noticing occurs when those cross your path. The middle part is pulsating, why is it pulsating? Are the antennae thicker than a fishing line? The body is definitely larger than the head of my toothbrush. Aren’t you excited to remember all this?

Three days later, I was asleep, and then I wasn’t. I found the cockroach in my bed, crawling across my forearm.

Weirdly, I woke up having already killed it. The order of events felt out of order: I fell asleep, the cockroach crawled into bed and onto my arm, I smushed it with my thumb like I was taking my pulse, and then I woke up.

It’s like that old joke where someone is dreaming about eating a giant marshmallow, only instead, they’re mashing a small macaron into their wrist. Yes, that was what it felt like. Aren’t you excited to remember all this?

Now that the intruder had been dealt with, and because I was wide awake, I had some time to come to terms with what just happened. Sleep wouldn’t even be a consideration for awhile.

After googling “can cockroaches bite?” and nervously checking the sheets for others without disturbing my sleeping partner, I heard another noise, louder than the drumming, and less rhythmic.

It was coming from outside. The palm trees on the other side were brushing and clawing against our window in the midnight wind.

They’re trying to get in. It’s all trying to get in.

Nature in its many forms must love a vacuum. It must delight in the fertile emptiness of all the manmade spaces we’ve abandoned since we had the capability to abandon things.

The moment we stop boarding up the walls, it comes back to fester and burrow and bore into what it lost, encasing it all in a gnarled calligraphy of roots, vines, and antennae.

I’m the correctional officer taking Pablo Escobar’s smiling mugshot, temporarily capturing something wholly unstoppable.

Thank you for your time.

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