The Parasites Will Love You
On at least one day in the past, I was born. It could have gone through the span of two days if I began being birthed near to midnight then was finished being birthed after midnight. But that doesn’t matter. I was birthed, and I don’t remember when, because I don’t care. The doctors held up the little naked human maggot and said “It is male.” Then they handed it to my mother and she said, “It is John.” Some emotions probably happened and that was it. I do not understand it, but it happened. The main thing I do not understand is how you can look at a little stupid chubby baby and think, “John.” I can understand the correlation between the fact that all white human babies look the same and almost all white males are named John, but that doesn’t justify the fact that the name that was chosen to be the name of almost all white males was John. I don’t understand it, but it is. “That’s just the way things are. You gotta deal with it.” Those are the words of my mother. I do not go by them, but I remember them just in case, and it is almost always that case, which, you could say, means I do go by them, but I do not. Some words I do go by though, are this: You cannot evade exactly anything you ever experience. It is inevitable that everything that will happen, will happen. Because of this, you cannot change anything, only contribute. So I try to contribute to the fact that my name is John by acting like a John.
There are many steps to acting like a John. The first step is meeting people, because all Johns meet people. And within that step is another set of steps. It’s like a never-ending staircase to nowhere. It doesn’t take you to the end of the universe. It just takes you to the ground, though it seems nearly impossible for people to be more grounded than they already are. Six feet above now, then six feet below. The average of that is zero feet. The average of that is the ground. We’re basically nothing, or we’re the Earth. But mostly people think we are neither.
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Every car drives by. Every car, with a baby or child safety seat in the back. I would ask the parent, “and how did you decide to have a child?” but that would be an invasion of privacy, and would be quite a strange thing to shout out the window of your car to a stranger. According to rules, anyway. It is quite strange to me that anyone would decide to have a child, but I can’t say that. One can not utter such a thing before the ears of a conventional, traditional person. (Or, what I like to call them: the “Black Suit, White Dress”.) By a stranger, one would be called crazy. By a psychiatrist, schizotypal.
And so I arrive at an art museum. I am not entirely sure what it is called because I don’t care, so I have forgotten. There is no name on the museum itself. Strange, because people have to have names and wear them like they are their identity. But I’m not walking into a person and finding my way through their corridors and looking at their walls. I’m not even sure I want to do that here, either. But I walk into the unfamiliar building. Expect to know where to go. I followed a GPS all the way to it. I am meeting someone.
Takes a while to meet someone. First, you have to have your black-out curtains covering each of your windows, just to be totally sure that they have not seen you in your house. Because you never know what exactly motivates a person to first speak to you. Then, you follow a certain procedure: between each text, wait a different amount of minutes. So that it does not seem obvious that you do not want to talk to them. Because people will sometimes notice that it always takes you exactly 6 minutes to reply each time. So you gently remove them from your life and you start over. And you change it up, because in order to be a person, you must change. But not too much. No, because then you aren’t you anymore. You are fake.
One nice thing about having a small car is that no matter how badly you park, you are still in between the lines. I get out and lock my car 12 times. I put my hands in my pockets. It takes me a while to find the door, but I do. And sure enough, immediately when I am inside, a baby is already crying.
I badly want to say something. The colors in a painting straight across from me are so vibrant I could scream. There is a buzz. A woman hits a buzzer every single time someone buys a ticket. The baby is still crying. It is probably because of the vibrant colors. It is too young to see such a thing. It is too young for me to see that it exists. I encounter a discomfort.
The third step to meeting someone is making sure you don’t accidentally hurt them. I once stepped on a lady’s shoe and she never spoke to me again. But that’s because there was a bug. I normally enjoy bugs; they are very pleasant in that I am able to coexist with them without them expecting me to do anything. But that one was expecting me. He knew I would be there. He wanted me to kill him. That was what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to be dead. So I ensured that there would be a way that would happen which I would know about. It’s good to know why and how everything happens. Because one day in the future, something will have happened. And of course, it was supposed to, because that’s why it did. But you don’t know how. You don’t know how that situation was created. You could have contributed.
The fourth step to meeting someone is to not expect them. You are supposed to say, “Hello! I didn’t know I would see you here,” like you didn’t know you would see them there. You are supposed to greet them. You are not supposed to describe how you got here in a foggy blur and don’t remember how you did, but you remember something about baby car seats. You say, “Good,” when they ask about the way that you are. Lying is easy. You just say it. There is no underlying truth anyway. You must lie; say that you enjoyed talking to them and would love to spend more time with them. The absence of the lie would be the absence of anything. I do not feel a truth.
The baby is crying once again. I had not noticed that it had stopped. I would enjoy to see it writhing more if it was not making a sound. I would like to see how it reacts to the fact that it is here without loudly letting everyone know. It did not ask to enter. It would rather see a black wall than the vibrant painting. It would rather see a black wall than the white one behind the painting. I know I would. Black does not bother me. It is like closing your eyes.
I slowly realize that I am in line, so I inch forward, being careful not to step on anyone’s foot. The baby stops crying and I notice it this time. I look up, and it is staring at me over the back of its parent. The parent does not know. It reaches its hand out and it touches a piece of my hair. I would rather it not do that. And so I say, “That is my hair. You do not have hair because your head does not require it yet. If it does, it will grow. It will not be like mine because genetics is a complex thing. So you don’t need mine. Thanks.” A woman next to me thinks I am talking to her. She says, “What?” to me, as if I am going to repeat the whole thing over again. And then she says, “Oh, hello! I did not expect to see you here.”
I am not entirely sure if she did expect to see me or not, but I say, “Hello. How are you?”
And she says, “Good. How are you?”
And I say, “Good.”
I slowly inch forward again, and the baby begins crying. I hope that the lady will not speak again.
“There are many bugs outside,” she says.
The baby glares at me. It was like it was my conscience.
“Indian mealmoths,” I say.
“Oh. Are you an entomologist?”
I have no idea what that is.
“Yes,” I say.
It is now my turn to pay. I suddenly realize that I do not have money. I offer the woman my headphones because she enjoys loud sounds so much, so I figured maybe it would be nice if she would keep them to herself. She ignores me, then waves her hands in a weird way. I continue to stare at her red hair and I wonder which of her parents had red hair, or if they both did. Then someone pushes me to the side. It was the lady I spoke to. She says, “I will pay for his,” which is odd, because not in any way was I benefiting her. But she does. She hands the lady what seems to be $20. Then the lady hit her loud buzzer. Up on the wall next to her is a digital counting machine of some type. The number goes up by two.
“Okay. Thanks,” I say.
She takes my hand and begins walking.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“We are going to see sculptures.”
That is not what I asked, but I take it for an answer. People’s minds work in strange ways.
We walk through winding halls and I lose track of where we are. We eventually stop where there is a big thing made of paper-like material that looks like a p*nis.
“I do not want to see this,” I say.
“Yes you do,” she says.
Okay.
“Oil paint on canvas,” she says.
“This is not a painting,” I say. “This is a p*nis.”
“It’s a sculpture, but not technically, by the rules of art.”
The rules of art. Art’s rules. The rules of that, what does not have rules.
“It is made from canvas and painted with oil paint,” she says. “Then glued into a 3D shape.”
“Okay,” I say.
“This reminds me of something,” she says. “I feel like no one loves me.”
She must be a Black Suit, White Dress person.
“The parasites will love you when you’re dead,” I say.
Suddenly, I feel an ugly feeling in my stomach. She is pretty. A shallow thing to think—a Black Suit, White Dress thing to think—but true. Though seemingly young, she has white hair. The parasites will love her, but someone should love her now. Then eventually they will pointlessly get married and have children, even though instead they could be creating large penis sculptures out of canvas. Which is what someone actually did, I guess. I’ve never spoken to someone who would, though. Where are these people?
“You are absolutely right,” she says. “They will.” And then she smiles. I thought she would roll her eyes. It gave me a different feeling.
I would say, “I love you,” but according to my experiences of seeing people’s experiences, one would not say such a thing so early. It would be pointless to lie about something so ridiculously important to people so soon. But something was telling me to say it. Maybe it was the baby, who was now gone, but I still felt the presence of. Maybe it was the Indian mealmoths. Maybe it was the parasites.
People always seem to be concerned with the continuation of life. An afterlife, anti-aging creams, reproduction of species. Though as an over-evolved, over-populated species, humans feel as though it is especially important that they themselves have “children.” And they ignore the “over-populated” part. They think they are “just-right-but-there-maybe-should-be-more-populated.” Their love revolves around s*x and reproduction. So because of this, love to me is the opposite of that, because their idea, first of all, is just blind and ridiculous. Love, to me, is whatever it takes to restore what is destroyed, not add more to what is already thriving and abundant. Love is worms and dirt, which, by the way, are cleaner and less gross than humans.
This lady, she seems clean.
“Do you want to leave?” I say.
I had forgotten an important prerequisite to asking that question: the consideration of how much money she had paid. Because Black Suit, White Dress people care about that.
“Sure,” she says, without hesitation.
And that is when I came to the conclusion of how very clean she is. Untainted. Would maybe never wear a white dress. I am more tainted than she is. I make sure to be careful unless I forget. Being careful is a result of learning from other humans. When you don’t learn from other humans, you are true.
After seeing one installation, I am satisfied. It felt like many more installations. Because, practically, it is all an installation.
“I walked here,” she says.
That means she did not have a baby car seat.
“Oh,” I say. “I drove here.”
“I swallowed a few mealmoths,” she says.
Mealmoths willingly went into her. That means there was no toxic artificial radiation coming off of her. They were taking her.
“You are loved,” I say.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because you are. It was going to happen, so it did.”
We find ourselves standing in front of an exhibit of what looks like outer space, the universe. I don’t know how to explain it except that it was painted to look infinite, even though I know it is not infinite, because then it would be filling the whole museum, and so on. It is not filling the whole museum. Just a part of the wall.
“I have a question,” she says. “Do you know if the universe ends? I feel like I can trust you.”
I think for a moment. “The universe does end,” I say. “And outside of the edges, there is only pure whiteness that goes on forever. I know, I've been there.”
Whiteness, not blackness. I have seen it in a dream. It would seem as though there would be blackness outside of the edges, because there is so much whiteness here. So much birth. So much claim to be pure. But maybe here, there is an absence of anything, not an abundance of everything. Maybe the life of humanity is death, and what is outside of it is life. Maybe we are just the food and clothes for parasites. I wouldn’t mind that. I feel like a cloth most of the time. Today was the first day I have not felt like a cloth. I felt like what was in a cloth. I felt like I was controlling a body.
“Where do you wanna go?” she asks. She is still holding my hand.
“I’d say the whiteness outside the universe, but I think I’m already there,” I say.
I reach out and touch her hair.
“… I can feel it.”
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