Dear the microplastics that live in my body, How are you? I hope you are well and enjoying the unseasonable humidity of my lungs, kidneys and blood. I’m writing today because I am likely to have housed many of you for years now and I thought it time to reach out. I just want to talk.
And first, let me make something clear, I don’t want to be thought of as a landlord. OK? I’m just a guy, just a normal little guy like you – I’m not some scary flesh monster who’ll evict you for putting up pictures (as long as you don’t leave holes in the stomach wall) or hassle you for rent. I may be human, but I am also humane. Besides, I couldn’t get rid of you even if I tried. Nothing works, haha.
In many ways microplastics, we’re just the same! I, too, enjoy adventure. I, too, enjoy swarming through darkness with a thousand of my closest friends, seeing what the evening brings. Night swimming down a lazy blood river, navigating attachment issues as we float further away from our parental host. I, too, enjoy baffling scientists and causing international media panic. I, too, studiously avoid degrading.
We have more in common than you think, so if you’ve been nervous about talking to me directly, as opposed to stitching yourself into the soft part of my brain and waiting for the cognitive decline to send its own special message, please – I won’t bite. Despite the fact that swallowing you in my weekly credit card-sized portion of microplastics is likely how we got here in the first place. And I am happy about that. I am! I have no choice. Besides, having spent my childhood gnawing on Biro lids, I know macroplastics are far harder to digest.
Do you miss the sea? Do you drift through my stomach dreaming of the Pacific, of the fish you have passed through, the wrecks you have seen? What magic you must have known. Yes, you might trigger cancer, yes you might cause endocrine disruption, weight gain, insulin resistance and decreased reproductive health, but still, in many ways I have come to feel closer to you than I do to any of my friends or family and not just because these friends are outside of my body, and/or annoying.
I appreciate you. Me and you, microplastics that live in my body, we ride through life together like Lennon and McCartney, Joey and Chandler, Greta Thunberg and the internet men who get angry about her. I’m the bread-winner, popping off to work to maintain our internal ecosystem, you’re the wisecracking in-sidekick, with your insistence that you’re the sixth major food group and suggestion that we should chuck out takeaways and just eat the box instead. Sometimes at night I wonder, as you tiptoe around in my liver, about the role you play in making me the person I am. Ego? Id? With your cobalt colouring and incredible resilience, are you the most real part of me, visible in X-rays, and sometimes the dark? Versatile, hyped, are you my “fun side”? Could you be (I ponder, as I drift off to sleep) my soul?
That said, I would like to ask a favour. If possible, please could you avoid causing oxidative damage, DNA damage and changes in gene activity? Listen, go wild on the reproductive health thing. You can have that, enjoy it – ride my fallopian tubes like a Big Dipper, camp out in my womb and call it Glastonbury, good luck to you, I turned 44 the other day, I’m happy someone can use it. But the other stuff – would it be an awful pain if you just didn’t do the thing with the inflammation, cell death, lung and liver effects, changes in the gut microbiome, altered lipid and hormone metabolism or the introducing antibiotic-resistant bacteria? I would really appreciate it! No worries if not.
What I’m hoping is, by reaching out like this, that I can get to know you better. I love tiny things, ask anyone – to me there is nothing more adorable than a doll’s house-sized object, a wincy plant, a teeny plate of spaghetti, suitable only for a busy mouse. Microaggressions are my favourite kinds of aggressions, micromanaging is the only type I do – I think we could really be friends. I want to know you. I want to know what you’re into, what you’re listening to, what else is living in there with you. I always think: spiders? But more probably I guess, you’re living alongside all my other panics, anxieties, fears for the future. I hope it’s warm in there.
And I know next to your immortality, I may seem basic, fleeting, transient. I am a rental rather than a forever home, I understand that all too well. But I will ask that, as tenants, you do your part in keeping this body pleasant, its insides in good order – mildly exfoliated, ribs polished. I have noted the complaints about sugar intake and slothfulness you have left in my hair, but let’s keep things friendly, OK? Otherwise I will specify, when my body passes on, melting through full and thorough cremation. All the best, Eva.
