My house is being eaten from the inside out, from bottom to top, but you wouldn’t know by looking at it.
Electromagnetic waves are invisible to the naked eye. That’s also true of gravity. God too, independent of iteration or denomination.
Not termites. They hide well but I found them schmoozing under baseboards, climbing up the roof, rifling through wooden doors, drilling through plastic. Termites are not discriminating eaters. What they really love is humidity.
Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. You can feel it even if you can’t see it. The Amazon region is the most humid area in Brazil, reaching up to 90% humidity. My house is in São Paulo, not nearly as much humidity, but termites are still quite happy here.
Parasites like humidity too. Anuses are quite humid, which is why female pinworms deposit their eggs there. I discovered my intestinal worm almost three months after discovering the termites eating my house.
Pinworms are hard to diagnose. A stool culture won’t identify their presence and there are no symptoms. Only stringy white worms in the toilet or tape to the anus can confirm they are there.
Amidst the wiggling white things, there was also a broken tooth and a depression diagnosis, dysthymia. It had been with me most of my life but I’d never seen it. Like the termites, it went unnoticed until there was no avoiding it.
I’m an atheist—I believed in what I couldn’t see until I no longer did. Perhaps my disillusionment took root when the priests kicked me out of the Catholic lay group I was volunteering with because I was living, unmarried, with a Catholic religious brother (he had vows of celibacy, like a priest, but couldn’t conduct a mass). I think they were bitter that I led the man astray. The woman always gets blamed, even in the 21st century.
Scientists have discovered naturally occurring all female termite colonies in southern Japan. The virgin termites were found to be thriving.
That former religious brother, not a virgin when I met him, became my former husband. I struggled to find a way to gracefully coexist with him; it took years to diagnose divorce as the best solution.
One rainy day, months after fumigating the house, I took the lid off an electric box and pale white grubs were squirming from here to there. More termites. The exterminators refused to return to follow up on their five-year guarantee. Given what I saw in the wall, they definitely did not fulfill their end of the bargain.
I had to decide if I’d let the termites be. It was easy to pretend they weren’t there. They didn’t really bother me, minus the lingering awareness that they were potentially making my home unlivable.
Eventually, I opted for a new exterminator. I fixed the tooth and took meds for the parasites and dysthymia. I’m sure the termites are still here; the depression definitely is. The parasites haven’t reappeared, but they are the kind that rarely make their presence known.
The house is still standing, though there’s no way to verify the structural integrity of what lies out of sight. Just like me. The only guarantee I have is that parasites and termites are endemic to nature and there are always things lurking under the surface, even if I want to ignore the unseen.
Melissa Witcher (she/ela) was born in Brazil, raised in the U.S. and has lived in São Paulo since 2011. She is left-handed and prefers cats. Her rejections far outnumber her acceptances but her writing can be found in the wild & wonderful literary hinterlands. She muses at atawdrymind.substack.com.