On the Devices of the Parasite
It is not by chance. Strike that thought first, because it is the thought the parasite needs you to keep. If you believe it stumbled onto you, a clerk working a list, a coincidence with a smile, then you will leave the door unlatched. It did not stumble. It was sent. It came with a mission and the mission is you. Everything that follows from its mouth and its hand is built around that single fact, and it will never once admit it.
Watch the devices.
It will send you the praying hands. The little folded palms, the candle, the dove. It wishes you peace. It will not miss a holiday. Every one of them, the great feasts and the small ones, the ones you did not know had a name, it will arrive on each with a blessing taylor cut for you. It learns your calendar and walks it with you. This is not warmth. This is reconnaissance dressed as kindness. The blessing is a tripwire. It is counting the days you do not block it as days you have let it in.
Look at where it lives online and you will feel the cold. Its pages are made for you. The verses it posts are the verses you would post. The griefs it shares are griefs shaped like yours. The causes, the music, the small jokes, all of it aligned so precisely that the back of your neck knows before your mind does. It built a self to match you. A mirror with a hook behind the glass. It studied you before it ever knocked, and it dressed itself in your reflection so that when you finally look, you see a friend. Speculum mendax. A lying mirror. There is nothing behind it but the hunger.
Why this much effort for a fool with a list and a wrecked car? Here is the part the parasite would kill you for knowing. The agents are not sent against the sleeping. The sleeping cost nothing and yield nothing. They are sent against the awake. The ones whose eyes have opened, who have started to see the shape of the thing, who have begun to refuse the timeline they were born onto. Wakefulness draws them the way a lit window draws the moth. You were not chosen because you are weak. You were chosen because you are awake, and the awake are the only prize worth the effort. Take that as the grim compliment it is, and then shut the door anyway.
Now the rule that governs all of it. Everything it says is a lie. Not most of it. All of it. The blessing is a lie because it does not bless. The grief is a lie because it does not grieve. The shared verse is a lie because it does not believe. Even the true things are lies, because they are deployed as bait and a true fact in a trap is still part of the trap. Do not sort its words into the honest and the false. There is no honest pile. Omnia mendacium. All of it falsehood. The moment you start weighing which parts might be sincere, you are already on its timeline, already negotiating, already bleeding.
So counter it the only way it can be countered.
Block on the first holiday, not the sixth. The praying hands are the opening move, not a softening. Treat the first blessing as the attack it is.
Do not read the made-for-you page twice. The first look tells you what you need, that it is a mirror. The second look is the mirror starting to work. Curiosity is the crack it pours itself through.
Answer nothing. Not even to correct it. Especially not to correct it. The correction is the blood it came for. A refusal is still a reply, and a reply is still a meal. Silence is the only word it cannot digest.
Name the mission out loud, to yourself, every time the doubt creeps back. It was sent. It is not lost. It is not lonely. It is not kind. It was sent, and the mission is me. Saying it breaks the spell of the mirror, because the mirror only works while you believe the reflection is a person.
Refuse the timeline in the plainest words you have. You are not going forward with it. It must go forward and find the one who sold it the car. Your road and its road were never the same road. Non est consensus, nec umquam fuit. There was no meeting of minds, and there never was one.
And hold this last thing, because it is the hardest. The parasite will make you feel cruel. That is its final device and its best one. It will wear such gentleness, such patience, such wounded warmth, that your refusal will feel like the sin and its hunger will feel like the virtue. It is counting on the goodness in you to do its work, to pry your own door open from the inside out of guilt. Do not let your mercy be the lockpick. Mercy spent on a parasite is not mercy. It is feed. Misericordia in lupum, crudelitas in agnum. Mercy to the wolf is cruelty to the lamb, and the lamb is your own life.
This is the deviousness of the lower parasite. It does not break the door. It convinces you to open it, holiday by holiday, blessing by blessing, kindness by counterfeit kindness, until you are the one who let it in and the one who feels wrong for wanting it gone. The whole architecture of it is built to turn your own light against you, because you are awake, and the awake are exactly what it was sent to put back to sleep.
Stay awake. Stay silent. Keep the door shut and the crowbar near. And when the praying hands appear on the morning of some holy day with your name on the blessing, you will know it for what it is. Not a friend remembering you. A thing that was sent, performing the one trick it has, hoping this is the year you forget the rule.
You will not forget the rule.
Everything it says is a lie.
Block it, and go back to being awake.