“To live is to be entangled.”

Anna Tsing

Everywhere and Nowhere

Living with health anxiety OCD, I have known parasites, inside and out. I have known their names, hearts, sounds, and breaths. I have felt as if they are living and breathing and dying inside of me. To most people, they are fiction—monsters lurking in the shadows, sly and unseen things unfathomable to human imagination and sometimes even to science. But to me they are real. They are everywhere and nowhere to be found.

Don’t Speak of the Devil

I speak of them in hushed tones, as if the word itself will draw them near me. A part of me thinks that they are vile, invasive, and alien. But the true me—the self not yet overtaken by OCD—knows their place in the tapestry of life: I know how important they are; they have disguised themselves into nearly every living system. They inhabit every free-living animal; they reshape ecosystems, rewire bodies, and disturb dynasties. Their lives force me, and each one of us to reconsider what we mean by self, by health, by balance.

That Funny Feeling

Consider the Sacculina barnacle for example, it slips into the body of a crab and quietly rewrites its destiny, hollowing its existence out until the crab tends the parasite’s offspring as if they were its own. Or the isopod Cymothoa exigua, the worm-like creature that enters through the gills of a fish, a sly little thing that latches onto its tongue, becoming the tongue itself. They all live at the boundary of horror and genius: taking without killing, surviving by holding on to another’s pulse. Never letting go. To call them monsters is easy, very easy. To see them for what they are is hard.

Danger, Fire, Chaos.

I have found that what disturbs me the most , and probably many other people in these parasitic stories, is how they can blur the boundary between self and other; death doesn’t occur, but the body is “handed” over to the parasite. That is to accept that our body is not a temple; it’s open from every possible angle to invasion, to war, as it is open to love and healing. We are all that flows to us from a thousand sources. There is no one without the other. Some that birth us, some scare us, some simply pass through without leaving a name, some just make a living.

What I am learning—slowly, unwillingly—is that fear does not come from parasites themselves, but from the illusion that we are forever sealed shut. Like canned beans. Invasion is way less frightening than realizing that we were never whole. I think the difficult thing is to accept that we leak. All the time. Life leaks. Life enters. That’s how we stay alive.