tbd

I do not arrive with teeth or claws.

I am as small as a breath fogging the mirror. I have no feet to cross thresholds, no hands to open doors with. I am a pattern wrapped in a protein, a thought without a thinker, waiting for a moment of warmth to lift me from one tide into another, and I only enter places I can squeeze through.

They will later come to call me a curse. But I am carried by closeness. I am born in the hush after laughter, in the slow, trembling slide from mouth to skin. And I am nothing without my home.

My home has a name. I first heard it giggled during a light-hearted tussle over bed-sheets: Julian.

But my home goes by many other names, as well. “Jules”, when his sister tries to convince him to go out. “Julie” as his mom swats at his arm for riling up the dog. “Honey” or “Babe”, sometimes, when he spends the night with a handsome stranger.

“Mr. Miller,” when he visits the doctor.

He doesn’t visit the doctor, though, not for a long while. By the time he does, I’ve already drifted in along a soft border where the world is pink and wet and trusting. My world. My new home.

Julian, Jules, Julie, my home. I slip between his cells like a drunk “I love you guys” slipping from his lips when his friends carry him home from the bar. Inside, Julian’s atoms hum and blink and move together with a purpose that is not mine. I don’t mean to invade, only to belong, but I don’t know how to inhabit something without leaving my mark. So I look along his walls, etched with codes like instruction manuals. I don’t understand his alphabet, but I borrow it regardless, write myself into his story the best way that I can, hoping that will make us one, hoping that my misspellings will become my disguise. I could fill a book with my desperate attempts at making myself belong, one of Julian’s big, thick paperbacks, pages worn with age, covers creased and coffee-stained.

“What?” Julian grouses once, when his best friend chastises him about how he mistreated Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. “It’s well-loved, at least.”

I look upon the walls of my new home. No cracks, no stains, just my tentative scribbles and scrawls juxtaposed over his clean words.

Julian wipes his face with the hem of his oversized sweater and says, “Weird,” to the empty kitchen. He tells his friend later, “I think I caught something,” and falls asleep without further thought.

Julian smells of lavender fabric softener and palo santo. He talks to the ficus he keeps on his balcony, and the ficus does not answer, but it leans towards his voice. He has a scar on his shin from one time his sister accidentally knocked him over while riding a bike. He goes out jogging three times a week but spends most of that time petting random dogs that were out in the park with their owners. He brushes his sister off on weekends when she invites him for a hike, tells her that he’s busy working on his thesis, but really he spends almost his entire day in bed watching shows that make him sad.

Julian is my home now, but his body resists. I try to compromise with it: I will keep small if I may stay a little longer, I will change my shape to fit his. But still I am chased by fast cells with sharp jaws, hunting me in the corridors, in the rafters, in the lymph nodes and blood vessels and in the lining of his organs. I tuck myself deeper into Julian, and when the walls begin to tremble, I stick to them like wallpaper. The only way I know how to hide is by pretending to have always been there.

“Have you lost weight?” his mother asks, looking him over.

“I’m literally elbow-deep in this mac and cheese, mom,” he tells her.

“Well, help yourself to another plate. Your face looks drawn.”

And he does, but he keeps losing weight anyway. He doesn’t notice, because his mind is full of other things, like his ficus and his sister and the random dogs in the park. He falls in love with someone who keeps a guitar under the bed and knows the name of constellations. They read in bed together and when Julian rubs his feet together under the covers, his lover affectionately starts calling him “Cricket”. They argue about washing the dishes, sometimes they fall asleep watching bad movies, and sometimes they don’t because they have better things to do than sleep.

Years happen in the corners. The ficus dies because Julian forgets to water it after the break-up. His sister lights up his phone, and his thesis isn’t finished, and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night drenched with sweat.

Julian, Jules, Julie. Cricket. To say I love him is to pretend at a language I do not possess. But he is my home, and if my home is safe, then so am I. I want to belong with Julian. That’s as close to love as nature allows me to get.

I can taste his sadness through his poisoned bloodstream. Why would a home be sad? What makes a home happy? I think of Thanksgiving at his mother’s house, of Julian and his sister and boyfriend and so many other people filling the dining room with light and laughter.

A home is happy as long as it’s full, no?

So I fill Julian with me. I cut myself into a hundred little pieces, multiply and take over every spot I've yet to love within him. He will never be alone. I will make sure he will never be alone. By the time I'm done, the doctors will have a hard time determining where he ends and I begin. We won't become one, but we will get as close to that as nature permits.