A Good Host
It begins inside me as a change in weather, a subtle dampness seeping into what I had assumed was stable internal architecture. The walls of the mind sweating, the air thickening into something faintly sweet, the ground softening into a dark, nutritive mush. I had imagined myself a poor host for anything that requires sustained care, emotionally speaking; more concrete than soil, more drought than rainforest. But once the invisible spores settle they behave with a blind, tireless appetite, threading themselves through cracks in memory, blooming behind surfaces I don't regularly inspect, feeding on residue and warmth.
It wasn't anything worth dignifying as a moment. No dramatic confession that would later justify my fixation. Just a name, released casually into the air between us, and then, almost as an afterthought, the clarification that this person was an ex. I nodded, performed the appropriate facial expression of mild interest, let the conversation keep moving, convinced that nothing had lodged itself inside me, that the ecosystem remained sealed, dry, and intact.
Except the mind, when offered a foreign spore, immediately begins to irrigate.
Later I learned there was a word for what followed: retroactive jealousy, the particular embarrassment of becoming emotionally preoccupied with a lover’s past, with people who belong to an earlier tense. I found myself replaying the sound of the name, turning it over with an attention I pretended was accidental, letting it dissolve and reform in the mouth, attaching it to a speculative body, a speculative voice, the imagination quietly pumping moisture and oxygen into a seed I had sworn I hadn't planted. At first, it seemed harmless, faintly amusing even, this small private tending of a stranger, and I told myself, generously, that this was simply curiosity.
Infestations proliferate quietly at first, with small internal adjustments that go unnoticed until the air has grown heavy and the light no longer reaches the floor, the original landscape smothered under a dense mat of opportunistic growth that seems to have organised itself overnight. Vines begin looping around every available structure, slick and muscular, squeezing out whatever native softness once occupied the space. Fungal bodies push through the dark in obscene little eruptions, swelling and collapsing, releasing clouds of invisible spores. Warm pockets of thought become breeding grounds for insects I never consciously invited, their bodies multiplying in the warmth of my uncertainty, feeding on scraps of imagined intimacy, leaving behind a constant low-grade buzzing that makes it impossible to locate silence.
The ex stops being a person in any recognisable sense and becomes an invasive species, a contamination that seeps into neutral moments, drifting through conversations, attaching itself to songs, to the way my partner laughs, to the angle of light on a wall, so that even ordinary tenderness begins to feel infected, already halfway absorbed into the monoculture that now dominates the interior.
What's most humiliating is how total the takeover feels, given the complete lack of material presence. How a stranger I have never touched, never meaningfully encountered has managed to install themselves inside my mind, a fictional ecosystem capable of producing real physiological panic, real envy, real tightening in the chest. I catch myself circling the same questions again and again, probing the same damp corners for new information that never appears, as if repetition might eventually yield a different species of answer, as if the organism might finally reveal a weakness if I worry at it long enough, even as the entire exercise begins to feel increasingly absurd, an environmental collapse staged for an audience of one.
It becomes harder to pretend this is a purely internal disaster once you notice how efficiently the phone delivers nutrients directly to the infestation. It functions as an endless irrigation system, dripping images, histories, comparisons, soft proofs of other people’s lives into the already saturated soil, training the mind to scroll, catalogue, cross-reference, remember, to behave less like a human brain and more like a badly calibrated archive, incapable of forgetting. The broader culture seems designed to support this particular species of fixation, scattering fertiliser everywhere and calling it connection.
Romance often arrives pre-packaged in looping narratives that reward excavation and hindsight, that encourage the belief that every previous attachment contains essential information about the present, that love can be reverse-engineered if you gather enough data points. The ecosystem comes to privilege accumulation over rest, analysis over air, density over circulation, until the interior begins to resemble an industrial monoculture, all diversity stripped out in favour of a single high-yield crop of speculation and envy. Even memory, once a messy terrain, starts behaving algorithmically, resurfacing the same contaminated fragments again and again with cheerful efficiency, while any attempt to apply common-sense pesticides—perspective, reassurance, distraction—administered in small, ineffective doses, only seems to encourage more resistant strains of the original growth.
None of this is coincidental. The environment favours the infestation. The infestation adapts quickly.
I do attempt containment, snipping back visible tendrils of thought, starving certain mental pathways of oxygen, staging small controlled burns of distraction and discipline that look impressive for a few hours and then quietly fail to alter the underlying climate. Sometimes the ecosystem cooperates, settles into a fragile truce, the growth appearing dormant enough to lull me into a premature sense of competence, as though I have finally learned how to manage the terrain. Other times it surges back with renewed intensity, exploiting whatever lapse in vigilance I have generously provided, sending fresh shoots through hairline cracks I didn't realise existed. Nothing is ever eradicated, only temporarily displaced, pressed flatter, encouraged to wait underground until conditions become favourable again, which they inevitably do, because the environment remains hospitable, and because I remain, inconveniently, myself.
These days the ecosystem appears permanently altered, the soil never quite returning to its original dryness, the air always carrying a faint sweetness that I notice most on quiet afternoons or in the pause before sleep. The organism has not disappeared. It has adapted to live smaller, to coil itself into the darker pockets of the terrain, to pulse softly, a low subterranean hum that reminds me the ground is never truly neutral. Sometimes I feel it breathing alongside me, no longer actively hostile, but never benign, an occupant that arrived uninvited and stayed. The landscape still functions. Things still grow. But the earth remembers what passed through it.