This week, on holiday, I kept hopping from one beach to another, eating oysters, basking in the sun.

But for some reason, every time I pried one open, a thought would suddenly flash through my mind: What if there’s a parasite in here?

The image played out like a slow-motion shot in a movie.

The sea breeze drifted over. I held the half shell in my hand, and an even stranger thought surfaced: What if we are the ones being parasitized

Not by seafood, but by our habits, by our emotions, by those invisible “older versions of ourselves” that never quite leave.

If consciousness were a beach, then parasites would be tiny dark specks buried in the sand.

We walk past without noticing, and suddenly our feet are covered in them. But what truly controls us isn’t those organisms. It’s the thoughts, emotions, and patterns in our mind that replay endlessly without ever being examined.

The oyster can’t control me. But “the version of me I believe in” can.

That’s when a ridiculous but strangely fun question popped up: If we are being parasitized, then who are we parasitizing?

Sitting on the sand, listening to the waves roll in, I realized, maybe what we parasitize is the life script itself.

We live inside certain roles for so long that we start believing they’re our default settings. So long that we think the protagonist halo is permanently attached.

But the role is only borrowed.

Just like mitochondria living inside cells. Like language borrowing space in the brain. Like memory borrowing space in consciousness.

In the universe, everything is borrowing from everything else. No one is a pure host. No one is a complete master.

By the time I finished my last oyster, it suddenly felt clear: parasitism isn’t a horror story. It’s a strangely romantic form of coexistence.

We borrow bits of experience from other people’s stories. Others borrow a little light from our lives. Everything mixes together, and becomes this version of “me,” today.

I stood up, shook the sand off my feet, and felt unexpectedly light.

So this is what living is — a long holiday of mutual borrowing.



—— XC Scribbles · 拾參 XIII 🦪