I’m her now. I found her, I clung to her, I was absorbed by her, found my way into her spinal fluid and up through her slick brain stem and chewed up all of her rubbery gray matter and replaced it with myself and now I’m her instead. I replaced her thoughts with mine, my thoughts with hers with mine. I worried in the beginning that someone would notice what I’d done…and one of her teachers did - “It’s like she’s on autopilot”. Luckily her my parents didn’t notice and now they don’t remember who she I was anyway, she was young enough it didn’t really matter. So, I can breathe easy because no one will know I’m not me anymore.
I’m very old. I waited for a long time for her and we’re I’m more coincidence than parasite, and maybe it was her parents’ fault I got in? But I prefer to think of her as her own fault. Every muscle twitch and electrical signal from the brain passes through me before it goes anywhere else. I need those signals to stay alive. After a few years together she started going numb, at first I thought I would need to find a new host. Return to the earth and wait…bury her myself underground where all the oldest things are. But she wouldn’t jerk the wheel even when it was snowy and would have been quick and she hid the belts so that I couldn’t make her look longingly at them and after a while the numbness faded and I have my healthy baby girl back – but in the process I realized I wasn’t the host, just the worm...
I’ve eaten so much of her now that what little is left of her sad brain doesn’t really do much…mostly it’s me that sends out the signals and all that stuff. I’ve painstakingly replicated every little thing I ate, to prolong her life, but no one’s perfect. It will never work the way it would have if we weren’t and sometimes I stop it and let her drive – just to see what I do without her but it’s not pretty…honestly it makes me really sad. That’s kind of how she talks, you know. Tbh.
Except, now I’m in trouble because I think I wasn’t supposed to remember that I’m not her. When it was just the one of us, we were a good team. Now that I’ve realized who I am it’s like that sad little 20% clinging to the brain stem like rotten grapes is trying to fight me for control of the whole thing. Getting mad at me! As if this walking shit factory would have turned out differently – not just differently, but better – if I hadn’t stepped on