Like endothelial growth, or the suppression of certain immune properties, ideas spread and draw arms the way blood vessels do. Think of transportation, of delivering a message the way certain interleukins do. Spread and suppress, and wherever you are, inflame and burn. Watch them hurry to deliver the message of your arrival—or maybe trick them and don’t even be there yourself.

Either way, the microglia will react. In the best case, they’ll even overreact and tell your brain funny things, like make the world go woooo or forget how to speak. It’s not a loosening of muscle strength in tongue or mouth, but sand slowly dropping through the blood–brain barrier, slowly losing all its ability to form a sweet sandcastle.

You will also pass certain T cells on your journey—just make sure they don’t fuck you up. Make sure they think this particular idea has to be a happy one, or else they’ll eradicate it without mercy. Like the police, or Trump—they fucking hate foreigners. They actually make me think of ICE, the way they’re mistrained and run on stress and coffee breath.

I think you get it. Just don’t mind them. Don’t draw any attention. And never mimic bacteria.

Binding yourself to some weird happy chemicals, like opioids, should work. They travel almost all the way through the entire body, up into the brain. There, they settle and take control. I’m sure I can feel them sometimes, these happy molecules - but it’s kinda are.

Like fireworks or colored pencils, there is so much happening all the time. Wherever you are, you will certainly miss the rest. Wherever you go, you will certainly be wrong. Whatever you think, there will be other thoughts you haven’t thought.

To be honest, in the end that doesn’t change a thing. It doesn’t make the happy chemicals go faster or multiply.

Cells, though—they multiply. And mine got the wrong blueprint. I like to think of them as confused, or as visitors in a strange country, which makes the suffering part a bit more entertaining. Like, imagine being in Japan and no one speaks English, and you’re unable to learn Japanese. Yeah—that’s what it’s like to be a cell in my immune system.