Cold sores aka HSV-1
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The virus doesn’t really move around a lot once you contract it. It embeds itself in your nerve cells and causes the cold sores to form when… things trigger it. We’re still not 100% clear on what makes the episodes happen, but we’ve narrowed it down to a big list of triggers.
So if you got it from, say, a family member’s kiss, you came into contact with their virus via your lips. Maybe your lips were chapped or cracked, that was how the virus got in. You’ll keep having the cold sore where it got in because it stays in nerve tissue rather than moving around in blood cells.
Since it’s usually transferred via mouth-based things, it’s most likely to get in through the lips. We don’t typically have a lot of open wounds *inside* of our mouths and it seems to take contact with body fluids to “get in”.
So put another way: this isn’t a virus that’s very good at moving around your body. If it doesn’t get through your skin fairly close to something it can “live” inside, it isn’t going to last. Your lips are a place very likely to come in contact with it *and* happen to have the kind of tissue it wants. Other parts of your body not so much.
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