My mom, aunt, and grandma were apartment hunting. They walked into an apartment, and everything looked fine, but fleas started to jump on my aunt.

Pinnng. Pinnnng. Pinng. Little dots appeared on my aunt’s white sweater. Fleas. They were jumping on her and swarming her faster than my mom and grandma could flick them off. The fleas started digging into the sweater. My aunt took the sweater off and threw it away. The three went to a thrift store to buy a new sweater.

Allegedly, this was a thing. If there were fleas and my aunt was present, they would jump on her.

Fleas had once gotten into the house as kids. I remember my mom talking about “the fleas.” I was in the dining room. My mom was in the kitchen, baking cakes. She yelled, “fleas, fleas, fleas, the fleas are coming.”

I was playing with a Teddy Ruxpin toy, the kind that you could put a cassette in the back, and its mouth would move as it talked. My mom ran into the dining room, grabbed me, and carried me to the TV room, just one room over. I screamed and cried for my Teddy Ruxpin toy like a child dropping their favorite doll as they boarded a train, fleeing a war-torn country.

I never saw the fleas, but I pictured a swarm of circling black dots landing on things and ruining them. Yet, when I grew up and moved out of my family’s house and into a house with a roommate who eventually became my partner, I learned that my aunt and I had something in common.

My roommate had two cats. The weather warmed up. She told me fleas were in her room.

I walked in there with white crew socks on, and the fleas started jumping on me. When I left her room, she picked the fleas and put them into a dish of soapy water, where they died instantaneously. I walked back into the room. Waited 30 seconds. Walked out. She picked them off and killed them. And we repeated this until no more fleas appeared on my white socks.

One time, I was sure tiny insects infested another house we lived in. My partner told me that it was in my head. Others did too. They said I wasn’t sleeping enough. That wasn’t false. A lot was going on at the time. But one morning, I woke up and saw tiny blood spots on the bed sheets where I was lying. I checked the mattress for bed bugs but didn’t find any.

I went to the bathroom, and there was a little potted plant on the toilet. While I sat there, I felt pricks on my back. There were fleas in the plant. There were fleas actually all over the house in different places. My legs had bites all over them, and my back was bleeding from when they would bite me in my sleep.

I didn’t care too much for indoor plants after that nor for that partner. I still wonder why my aunt and I both attract fleas. I guess something in our genes lets us know when things are bugging us. Sometimes, throwing out the sweater or ending a relationship is good.