The texts were filthy. There was steam rising off of my phone. When I first started having sex in an app, I felt unhinged, like what is this middle-aged Midwestern mom doing on Al Gore’s internet—but why should the medium matter? A text, at its core, is language, and when wielded with poetry and precision, nothing is hotter than words.
And this man was good with words. He lived in another state and, like me, was untangling from a lonely marriage. He could not be in my life. He could not be in my bed. He could only be in my phone.
You know how cartoon characters fill up red when they’re angry? Until the kettle whistles and smoke bursts out their ears? The same thing happens to me when I’m turned on. It’s totally visible. You can totally tell. In the waiting room, I looked up to see if anyone was watching me have sex. That’s the thing with doing it via phone: you’re doing it everywhere. The grocery store, the bank, in line at the pharmacy, the car stopped at red lights, Zoom training seminars, Zoom therapy, or—at that particular moment—a gastroenterologist’s office in downtown Chicago.
Not very sexy, I know.
I was there for a follow-up procedure after a routine colonoscopy created “cause for concern.” I don’t have a healthy relationship with that phrase. The first time I heard it was when the gynecologist saw something on my ovary at a postpartum check-up after my son’s birth. “Cause for concern,” she said, and the next morning I had emergency surgery to remove the tumor.
Not long after, my friend Sarah took her two-year-old daughter, Sophia, to the pediatrician because she couldn’t shake the flu. “Cause for concern,” they said, and the next day she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.
More recently, my dad went to the clinic with a stomachache. “Cause for concern,” they said. He lived on an island in the Gulf of Alaska; at the mainland hospital, they found his pancreas chicken-pocked with tumors.
When the gastroenterologist told me he was concerned, I called my divorce lawyer and asked if she could write my will. Call it an overreaction, but it had been a rough couple of years: an international health crisis, a deeply divided country, my own stupid heartbreak.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“My butt,” I said.
There was a very long pause.
If you are under the age of forty-five and have not had the pleasure of a colonoscopy, allow me to share the specifics: you can’t eat for twelve hours, then you drink chalk, shit liquid all night, get knocked out at the hospital, and wake up an hour later to a nurse handing you juice.
Also: you’re not allowed to drive yourself home after the procedure, a fact that caused me and every imminently-divorced person to dive headfirst into a deeply cliché, yet entirely rational, whirlpool of self-loathing.
“I don’t have anyone to pick me up,” I sobbed in Sarah’s kitchen.
“I am literally standing right here,” she said.
“You don’t understand!” I wailed, but of course she did. This woman had moved
mountains of heartbreak.
“Let me help, Megan,” said Sophia. She was ten years old, in and out of hospitals her entire life. I watched as she poured water and blue food coloring into a jelly jar, the kind with the red gingham lid, and shook it like a martini. “It’s a potion,” she said, sliding the jar across the counter and into my hands. “For sadness.”
We made a plan: Sarah would wait for me after the procedure and I’d spend the weekend at her house recuperating. Easy, right? Except the night before, after I drank the chalk, I remembered that I had to give a lecture on Zoom and spent two ridiculously awkward hours excusing myself to the bathroom. And my son, who was supposed to be staying with his father, decided that he wanted to stay with me, and there was no food in the apartment because I wasn’t allowed to eat. And a blizzard hit—of course it did—and knocked out the heat, so we woke up on the Ice Planet of Hoth. I couldn’t find the circuit breaker. I couldn’t wash myself. I couldn’t take care of my kid.
You’ve seen this next scene in every movie ever made about single mothers: I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed.
My son sat next to me. He put his head on my shoulder. “Mom,” he said. “You’re doing a great job.”
“Megan?”
I looked up from my phone. The gastroenterologist’s office was on the sixteenth floor. Snow battered the windows. The walls were aggressively beige. A nurse stood at the door—scrubs, clipboard, the whole nine yards. “We’re ready for you,” she said.
I followed her down a hall and behind a curtain, where I changed into the robe, laid back in the wheelie-bed, and sexted with the man in my phone. The key, I had learned, was verbs. Good verbs are like plugging your body into an electrical socket; the current zips down to your toes. I liked thinking about my body as a place of pleasure, as opposed to danger.
I didn’t want to think about the danger.
Eventually the anesthesiologist hooked me up to an IV. My veins went cool and fuzzy. I looked at the machines. I looked at the fluorescent lights. I looked at the empty chair to the side of the bed. The last time I’d been in that position was when they cut the concern off my ovary. I remembered my husband sitting there, holding my hand. Now, he’s the man who is my son’s father. Before that, he was the man on Zoom next to a lawyer. Before that, he was the man who left me at Christmas. Before that, he was the man I saw occasionally in my apartment. But at some point, he had been the man who held my hand in the hospital. Maybe someday I will want to remember that man, but right now I’m just trying to survive.
“Love is a memory,” I said.
The nurse tapped the IV bag. “Wow,” she said. “This stuff works fast.”
I lifted my eyeballs from the chair and carried them over to my phone. There were a lot of texts. The letters danced, but I willed them to still: lots of verbs followed by: “Are you okay?” and “Do you need anything?” and “Can I help?” Recently, cautiously, the man in my phone had been tiptoeing away from sex and into conversation, into connection and care. A month later, he would drive across the Midwest to take me to the movies. A year later, I would introduce him to my son. A year after that, he would fly to Alaska to hold my hand at my dad’s funeral. But at that particular moment, I was deeply distrustful of kindness and near-feral with desire. I didn’t want a man in my life. I wanted a man in my bed. I wanted the man in my phone.
“Love is a fantasy,” I said.
“Goodnight,” said the nurse.
The next thing I remember is juice. It was the best thing I’d tasted in my entire life and that’s saying something, because I have eaten at Alinea and Jimmy’s Red Hots which FYI, I told the nurse, is the place that made ketchup illegal in Chicago. This was a new nurse, not the nurse from before. They must’ve changed shifts. How long had I been out? An hour? A lifetime? How many lifetimes had I already lived and would I get another one and was it greedy to want more, just one, this one—I want to see what happens, and did I say all of that to the nurse? I hope that I thanked her for taking such good care of me. Just in case: thank you, nurses. Thank you for holding our hands when it hurts.
The gastroenterologist walked in then and told me they “got it.” He was so calm. His voice was ten thousand joints.
“No more concern?” I said.
He nodded and a tsunami hit.
I couldn’t stop crying—the release, the relief. We carry so much fear in our bodies. We carry so much love.
Sarah stood up when I returned to the waiting room. Windows lined the walls behind her, the blizzard sky bright white across Lake Michigan. It was so beautiful. She was so beautiful. I don’t know about your friends, but man, mine are knock-outs. I was off-kilter still from the drugs and wobbled when I tried to walk; she caught me in a hug before I went down. “I got you,” she said into my hair.
Love is literally standing right here.
I don’t remember if I started crying then, or if I was still crying from before. Maybe I’d never stopped. Maybe I never will; this beautiful mess of a world and our own human bodies, so breathtakingly mortal.
“You forgot something,” Sarah said. She reached into her bag and pulled out the jar; blue water, red gingham lid. Of course, I cried harder, which, of course, made her cry. We were a hell of a scene in the gastroenterologist’s waiting room. I looked around to see if anyone was watching us, but they were all on their phones.
I know what you’re doing, I thought.
I thought, Enjoy it.
