“What are we looking at tonight, love?” The tarot reader asked me, their lips shiny with silver glitter. We were sitting at a round table covered with a black velvet cloth, a tealight candle between us.
It was First Friday at a downtown bar. The air smelled of eucalyptus and dust. People were wearing Dr. Martens and leather jackets despite the hundred-degree heat.
“I want to ask about someone… his name is Alexander,” I replied, watching them nod. “Why does he keep coming back?”
It wasn’t the exact thing I wanted to know, but I knew better than to ask the cards a closed-ended question. The tarot person shuffled.
In a few weeks I would be getting married to a woman who moved with me to Arizona from another country and with whom I rescued two dogs, but all I could think about was Alexander, my herpes virus.
***
Around sixty percent of adults in the United States have Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) — an infection that spreads by skin-to-skin contact, causes recurrent outbreaks of painful blisters and ulcers, and cannot be cured. Even though HSV is very common, only 0.22% of the infected population give their HSV a name¹.
He first arrived when I worked as an unpaid intern at the theater, where one of my duties was to welcome critics. There was a critic who always RSVP’d but never came, listed as: «Alexander Plus One».
On a gray November evening at the theater, I felt my lip itching with an unfamiliar urgency. Maybe I burned it with a coffee, I thought. But the itching soon developed into a white dot. It was Alexander, and I became his plus one.
I learned his pattern: he usually arrived around the same time I was getting my period, as if whispering: here, a little bonus. Each time he returned as a bigger, hungrier version of himself.
I went to the doctor and she recommended that I eat more organic meat, despite no evidence that diets rich in organic meat prevent HSV outbreaks. The problem with this advice is that I was a vegetarian.
“That explains it,” the doctor concluded, and sent me an invoice equal to one-third of my student stipend.
***
There are two types of HSV — HSV-1 and HSV-2. It’s HSV-1 that usually causes oral herpes or cold sores, while HSV-2 is more associated with genital herpes and most commonly transmitted through sex. But they can also cover for each other, and only a DNA test of the virus can identify its type. I didn’t know what type Alexander was, but it was clear that I was his type.
Being a host was hard work. But I tried my best to be a good one. I didn’t share cups or water bottles with anyone, because I wanted to keep him to myself. I watched everything that touched my lips and changed my pillowcase every day. I put on bright eye makeup to draw attention away from the bump he left on my lip. Still, it was the only thing I could see in the mirror.
I became used to handling my body as if it was a rose – a fragile and capricious creature that should be kept away from anything too much: whether cold, sun, or stress. I took prescription antivirals with me wherever I went, to use at the first hint of familiar itching; the bright orange pill container was my lucky charm.
The weeks leading up to the wedding, I put myself under a bell jar. I ate three times a day. I drank at least five glasses of water. I took vitamins religiously. I meditated: I am strong. I am protected. I am a rose. I will be able to kiss my wife at the ceremony.
Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of June, our older dog, breathing with her mouth open from the heat, and turned the temperature on the a/c lower, hoping that it wouldn’t wake Alexander up.
***
I pictured the ceremony as I had seen it so many times in The Sims 2, the social simulation video game on which I used to initiate same-sex marriages over and over as a kid, before knowing that it was a real thing, let alone that it would one day happen to me.
We would stand under the circular wedding arch decorated with ribbon and flowers. We’d exchange vows and rings, with the video game’s green crystals above our heads. And then — lean to each other for a kiss. But The Sims 2 didn’t prepare me for worrying about viruses — everyone there was always healthy. So I turned to the cards for advice.
“Okay, love, here we have Death,” the tarot reader said, pulling a card with their long, acrylic nails.
Me and Alexander — we are stuck together until death do us part: once infected, the host carries HSV forever.
Alexander, look at that card closer: a skeleton in the armor, the symbol of death, is riding a white horse. He carries a flag with a white-petal rose. The sun is shining above them: that’s the vitamin D I take every day, and whose deficiency may be linked to recurrent herpes outbreaks². The figure of a man lays under the white horse’s feet. Maybe that could be you?
You can let me live peacefully and go dormant for years: use my nerve cells as a place where you rest, and as the good host I am — I will sing you a lullaby.
References for “Being a Host”
- I made up this statistic
- Vitamin D Levels in Patients with Recurrent Herpes Labialis. Aynure Öztekin and Coşkun Öztekin. Viral Immunology 2019 32:6, 258-262
Image by Viva Luna Studios on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Being a Host - January 9, 2026