There is a relatively new school of genetic study that exists as a kind of marriage between the arguments contrasting nature and nurture. While it was previously believed that epigenetic changes only occur during foetal development, pioneering studies are showing that molecular detritus from certain types of diet, exposure to chemicals and also trauma, can be added to DNA in adulthood.

This trauma can pass through DNA and genome, haunting the blood and brains of those that inherit it.

These stories should be told with kinder words. Words that allow the tongue to curl and unfurl around the contagion of history. To click soft against hard palates; to lick wet and flat and spread on the back of age-stained, crumbling teeth.

We are raging here, platelet against platelet. Each indented vessel a battleship warring the other in a starless night. Each secret calcifying and cancerous. Metastasizing confidentials splitting and growing, forming bumps on wrists and ankles, hard excrescence on the on the ridge of the spine.

I am telling you these things because I am toxic and dying. I am sick with the stories of others. Immortality is an infection. We survive here, if we do, debilitated and silent.

I want to hold my poisoned lips to yours and shove my rotting tongue into the chasm of your mouth.