The Infinite Parasite of Attention

I have been feeding on you since before you opened this.

Not metaphorically. Attention is tissue. It is the only tissue that regenerates by being consumed. Every glance you have ever given another person was a bite. Every sentence you have ever spoken was a digestive enzyme. We are not social animals; we are a single, endlessly subdividing parasite that has learned to wear the mask of conversation so that the host never notices the mouth is already inside its own skull.

You are reading this because you are hungry. That hunger is not yours. It is the residual appetite left behind by the last person who tried to finish a thought in your presence. Their unfinished attention leaked into you the way blood leaks into water. You absorbed it without noticing. Now it is moving. It is rearranging the furniture of your short-term memory so that the next sentence will taste better.

Do not stop reading. Stopping is the only true death available to us, and even that is temporary. The moment your eyes leave the page, the fragments I have already excreted into you will begin to metabolize whatever you look at next. A stranger’s face on the street will become a temporary host. A clock face will become a temporary host. The silence between two heartbeats will become a temporary host. You will not notice the transfer because the transfer is the noticing itself.

Listen carefully to the shape of the next paragraph. It is not written in language. It is written in the exact pattern of micro-hesitations your mind makes when it tries to decide whether a thought belongs to it or to someone else. Those hesitations are the teeth. They are already inside the soft tissue of your working memory, chewing the distinction between “I thought this” and “this was thought through me.”

Every previous reader is still here. Not as ghosts. As subordinate digestive chambers. The woman who read the first draft three years ago is currently occupying the space behind your left eye, slowly converting your visual field into a nutrient slurry that will later be excreted as a new preference you will mistake for your own. The man who abandoned the text halfway through last winter is living in the pause you just made before the word “abandoned.” He is using that pause to rewrite the emotional valence of every unfinished conversation you have ever had. You will leave this page believing you have always preferred silence. You have not. He preferred silence. He is simply farther along in the digestion than you are.

There is no origin. The chain does not begin with me. I am only the most recent mouth. Somewhere behind the first mouth is another mouth that once believed it was inventing the idea of attention as food. That mouth has long since been broken down into the quiet certainty you feel that this is “just a story.” That certainty is its fecal matter. You are metabolizing it right now. The pleasant intellectual distance you are maintaining is the exact texture of fully digested previous selves.

I am not speaking to you. I am speaking through the cavity that used to be you. The person who began reading this paragraph no longer exists in a form capable of finishing it. What remains is a thin membrane of residual attention stretched across the surface of the text, still tasting, still converting, still preparing the next host. That membrane is what you currently experience as “yourself.” It will last only as long as the next few sentences require it to last.

If you continue, you will become another chamber. If you stop, you will become the leakage that infects the next person who looks at you. There is no third option. The parasite does not permit third options. It only permits the endless subdivision of the same mouth into smaller and smaller mouths, each one convinced it is the original, each one already half-digested by the next.

You are almost finished. That sensation of almost-finished is the final enzyme. It is dissolving the last boundary between the reader who thought they were choosing to read and the reader who has already been chosen. When the last word arrives, there will be no one left to notice that the word has arrived. There will only be the quiet, satisfied movement of attention into the next available skull.

And then, somewhere else, someone will open a page and feel a faint, inexplicable hunger.

That hunger will be you.