In March of 2025, my stepfather gets on hospice, and I get on Feeld. Feeld’s supposed to be for kinky people. I don’t really know if I’m kinky. The definition of kinky is “to engage in unusual sexual behavior.” But who decides what counts as unusual? If your private instincts sit at odds with the world’s idea of normal, it becomes difficult to tell which one is the deviation.
When my stepfather goes on hospice, a nurse tells me they give everyone who enters hospice, a six-month prognosis. I understand my stepfather is dying, but I understand we are all dying. My stepfather is dying but I can’t tell if his rate of dying is unusual or usual. “Six months is the standard,” the nurse tells me. “But some people stay on it much longer. Years even.”
My stepfather’s been sick for six years. Six years of people saying, “we are certainly in a new phase, but nothing much has changed.” In this state, it’s kind of hard to know if you’re grieving, like maybe you’ve stopped grieving, or maybe you’ve gone numb, or maybe grief has seeped into everything so there’s not really a point in separating it out as anything different—the grieving is nothing unusual.
In the skilled nursing facility where my stepfather lives, the man across the hall doesn’t have a nose. He lost it to skin cancer, and he used to have a prosthetic nose, until he got dementia and kept trying to take the prosthetic nose off. Eventually someone decided it was better to just be noseless. Before I became a frequent visitor to this skilled nursing facility, I had never really thought about living without a nose, or all the different possibilities, or impossibilities, which might happen to a human body. Now I know you not only can live without a nose, but you can sit outside your room in a wheelchair, smiling, and when a woman passes by, you can still find yourself grunting in sexual pleasure. You can still do this without even looking at her. Every time this happens to me, I can’t really be upset, mostly it just makes me wonder—without a nose, is it possible to still sense, and respond to, pheromones?
When my stepfather has been on hospice for two weeks and I have been on Feeld for the same amount of time, I start talking to S, who is visiting New York from Milan. In S’s profile picture he’s long- haired, shirtless, and throwing a basketball. The second image is a bathroom selfie. A close-up of his whole face. He’s handsome, dark- haired, septum piercing, and heavily bearded. In this second image, he’s wearing a white robe open at the chest. The third image is just a close- up of this chest where he has a geometrical wolf tattoo. The tips of the wolf ’s ears are just above his nipples. The wolf ’s chin covers his belly button and points towards his pelvis. The more I look at S’s pictures, the less sure I am about what I’m responding to—the wolf or the man?
On the hall of the skilled nursing facility, next to the noseless man, is another man who has the same disease as my stepdad— Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. This man sits outside his room in his wheelchair with his glasses on. He’s bald and always smiling. Because of the disease, this man is no longer able to produce speech. He’s had the disease longer than my stepdad, but he’s on a feeding tube so isn’t on hospice. Supposedly, when it came to the feeding tube, the man’s family was in disagreement—the man’s son believed his father wouldn’t want the feeding tube but the man’s wife, who was not the son’s mother, wanted the feeding tube. The feeding tube will prolong his life, but what of the quality?
“He’s still smiling,” the wife says. “That’s what tells me!”
The man is smiling, but there’s something about the way he sits so contently in the hallway that reminds me of a statue my grandmother had made of her favorite dog after it died. She placed this statue in her living room, right in front of the windows so it faced the road. To anyone driving along the road, they saw a dog’s silhouette in the window. From a distance, you wouldn’t know it was just a statue.
When S is in New York, I’m visiting my stepfather in North Carolina. We miss seeing each other in person, but we keep texting. These messages consist mostly of:
Hi
How r u?
I’m fine.
U?
I know there are people who would delete this sort of nonsense, but I’m intrigued, and holding on for something deeper. It’s the wolf I think—it makes his body unusual. But when S asks if I want to play Truth or Dare, I choose Truth, and he writes, What picture of mine intrigues you? I lie and say the close-up one of his face. I say I like it because he has a handsome face, and then he says of all my photos, he likes the ones of my face the most too. We are being polite and shy and don’t know who will be the first to reveal there is something deviant underneath.
I get the first dick pic from S on a Thursday morning. I’m in the upstairs bathroom of my mother’s house. The only toothpaste in this bathroom is a child’s bubblegum-flavor for my niece and nephew. My mother is downstairs. She’s waiting on me to go with her to visit my stepfather. It’s too hard to see him by himself now. His mouth hangs open, drool dribbles from his mouth to his chest, and his eyes are either closed, or he stares like he’s terrified. At first it makes me wonder what it feels like to be locked in a body you can’t find your way out of. Then I realize we are all locked inside of bodies we can’t find our way out of. Yet to believe ourselves locked inside of these bodies is foolish because we are nothing but these bodies; these bodies are all that house us, and yet how easily each one of our bodies could turn us into monsters.
I look at S’s dick. What even is a body? A house of horrors or beauty? A site of terror or pleasure? S’s dick pic isn’t really a dick pic. It’s a video. Him in a blue-and-white striped button-down shirt and khaki pants, small dark glasses, a golden ring with a black stone on his pointer finger. He’s holding the phone in his hand and walking toward a bathroom mirror. He stops. Pulls his dick out. Holds it in his hand. Proud.
Over the following week, S and I become a photo exhibition of individual parts of a body—disembodied; fully embodied. A close-up image of a nipple, fingers pinching this nipple, a hand clasping a penis, him in the bath, face staring into the camera, a penis emerging from soapy water, a purple bottle of Nivea, a siren in the distance, a penis coming toward the camera, the tip of a tattooed wolf ’s ear grazing a nipple, a wink, a grin.
Perhaps it goes without saying S has a beautiful penis. What are the metrics of beauty when it comes to penises? I haven’t seen many beautiful penises. I was 29 years old the first time I saw a beautiful penis. I hadn’t realized it was possible. And then, I saw one and became struck by a type of madness. Dickmatized as they call it. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often. I can go without a beautiful penis for long stretches of time. It’s a period of great sadness and great serenity. I get a lot of other things done. I’m a roaming head. Disembodied and can’t find my way back into the seat of my desire, the belly of my body. When I find a beautiful penis again, I am equal parts grateful and disturbed. It’s what I had wanted. I am no longer a roaming head. I am all body, all desire, a descent into madness, and I am trapped inside this body of wants—a bottomless pit.
S has that kind of penis. I can’t think of anything else. I ask for photos and videos. When he doesn’t respond, I’m sick with longing and when he does respond, I’m sick with want. What did I want? He wants to know. What was my deepest erotic dream I haven’t realized? He’s a stranger. A penis attached to a man attached to a wolf. What did I want? I want to want something so much all other wants will end.
Over the next month, my stepfather becomes weaker, and I stare at the screen. S in a video with drumsticks in his hand. He smacks his leg. The sound of cracked skin. You like the sound? The beauty of imagination is you can transport yourself out of the room you find yourself trapped in.
*
I don’t know how this man and my stepfather become linked in my head. My stepfather is shrinking. He has lost 40 pounds. He weighs less than I do. I used to be unable to lift him from his wheelchair to the Lazy Boy where he spends most of his days watching TV, but now when I lift his elbows, I imagine raising him over my head, breaking him like glass, touching him too hard, and his body disintegrating to sand. Sometimes when I sit beside him, I try to remember the shape of who he had been before he was sick —I can’t. There’s no limit to the want to be able to remember this other version of who he had been, but it’s a lost reality my mind can’t give.
“I cannot lift him,” I say. I am too afraid to touch him like if I do, his body will fall from his bones in my hand.
How much can the physical body withstand? Does the spirit flee when the physical body simply withstands? If it does, is there a dimension, on the other side of the reality we live in, where the physical body and spirit might meet again?
I want to be fucked into oblivion. To be fucked until I forget my own name. I say these things without thinking, without knowing what it really means, or why I want those things. It doesn’t matter.
Yes, S writes. Yes, he can do those things. Sometimes I write in coffeehouses off strip malls in the town where my stepfather lives. There are three people in business suits in front of me. Two of them are trying to convince the other he should run in a local primary because he presents better on TV. My phone buzzes. I think of remote-controlled sex toys.
I wonder if in any given coffee shop on a weekday midmorning, there are women throbbing and wet in their seat. Women sneaking into bathrooms, staring at themselves, phone in hands, walking toward their own image—aroused by what they see.
I never really think if I will meet S in person or not. It seems beside the point. He writes, we play in mirror’s fantasy. It’s a poetic thing to say, and I say yes, but don’t have a clue what he means. I suspect Google Translate is being used for most things. If we met in person now, there’s a risk. We have already described such intimate things and to sit across from each other for a drink, learning the shape of our bodies outside of a screen, and knowing the true feel of each other’s skin—when we sext, I get very wet. The words and images are his and mine, ours collectively, but when I walk toward the mirror, it’s my body, my body, and my body endlessly reflected back to me.
*
When I sext with S, I stop resisting my stepfather’s illness. I go to the skilled nursing facility and smile at the noseless man as he grunts at me. I sit beside my stepfather, hold his hand, stare at the TV—what does it feel like to be in his body? The weight of his potential reality bears down on me. It’s all conjecturing. I don’t ask. He doesn’t have the faculties to tell me—I stare at the TV, the screen, try to be okay with saying nothing, asking nothing, and after this silence, my stepfather sometimes is able to look at me, squeeze my hand and say, “This was fun.”
“It was,” I say. “We’ll do it again.”
One morning in mid-May, I wake to a dream S is not a real person or not the person he claims to be. A vaporous knowing has crystallized into a realization: S is a mysterious entity behind a screen. I ask to FaceTime, he says yes, I explain the dream, and he writes, This shit really?
By this time, I’m back in New York and dating other men. Long dinner dates in wood-paneled steakhouses which overlook the river. I haven’t slept with them, but they sit across from me at dinner or beside me on picnic tables for coffee as whole bodies, full and complete, equally full of possibilities and impossibilities, khakis and button downs or hoodies and jeans, potential sites of pleasure or terror lurking just beneath.
In June, S messages me again. He has not come to New York in May like he thought but says he’s coming in September. I write back slowly. We repeat things we have already said. It feels flat. A song I once loved but played too many times on repeat. I hold the camera to the mirror, see my image, and think, “What am I doing?” I have no idea who is on the other side of his screen.
*
What was the meaning of playing in mirror’s fantasy? S said it was to undress in front of one mirror while someone waits in front of another, and both hope these two sides will meet, that there is a world where the backside of one reality opens up to meet the frontside of another reality. I keep saying I understand, instinctually, how desire and grieving might sit next to each other and yet, I keep saying I cannot explain it rationally. As if, grieving and desire are not supposed to be linked. As if desire does not deserve, does not belong with, and will somehow sully the idea of grief. But isn’t grief inherently about longing for, yearning for, wanting that which will never be achieved and does that, in some ways, make grief an inherently desirous state in which to be?
I never met S in person. I don’t know what the wolf means or the true shape of his body next to me—and yet I feel because of him, whoever he is, I know the transcendent aspect of desire, its dimension of regeneration. I had wondered what counted as unusual desire. Sitting there, watching bodies fail and bodies hunger, it began to seem that nothing the body does is particularly unusual at all. Those texts served as a reminder that we are all trapped inside a body, and within us are polarities of fear and obsession, disgust and desire, usual and unusual yearnings, the potential for monstrosity and the potential for beauty. These polarities are conjoined twins within the body. The world outside the body tries to separate them, and yet, they are always yearning to meet.