The Strangers Inside You

Every living thing is gripping something — and what you are gripping, deep inside the walls of every single cell in your body, used to be a stranger. A separate creature. An invader, or a guest, or something in between, depending on which of them you ask. This was before memory, before animals, before anything with a spine had ever drawn a breath. A cell — something simple and ancient, the kind of thing that owned the whole world back then — swallowed another cell. And then it did not digest it. It kept it. Alive. Inside. The thing it swallowed knew how to do something the host could not: pull energy from oxygen, the way you might keep a fire-maker in your house because you never learned the trick yourself. Generations passed. Millions of them. The guest forgot how to leave. The host forgot what it was like before the guest arrived. And now, inside you, in every cell that makes you, there are these small ancient engines — mitochondria — that still carry their own separate DNA. A different ancestry. A different origin story. You are not one thing. You have never been one thing. You are a city that forgot it was built on a treaty.