"Lovesick" by Alison Wellford
I’m no good at masturbating. For me, sex has always been about two, of the hunt or being hunted, of being desired, of falling headfirst into the abyss of the other. But lying on the twin mattress in the stuffy attic room of the rented cabin where I am stuck alone with shitty internet for the indeterminate future, I wish it wasn’t so impossible.
Month three. It’s going pretty downhill. The locals won’t wear a mask, my best friend thinks 5G technology is to blame for the virus, and I can’t remember what day it is. I have half a podcast downloaded on the rural WiFi, and the epidemiologist says there will be more children born from this crisis than any other in history. They say that with so much time on our hands, everyone is having sex. Everyone except me. A columnist warns that getting sick can make you horny, something about Oxytocin release for pain. “Be safe,” he says. “Wear PPE.”
I open Tinder to yesterday’s chat with Natasha. In our last conversation she asked me to touch myself.
“Are you?”
I said yes, but I wasn’t. I was curious what she would say.
“You’re such a woman. I’m such a woman for you. Do you like my womanly hips in my photos? My womanly breasts? I want to make you feel like a woman.”
I said yes, but something didn’t seem right about this conversation.
“Faster, touch yourself faster,” and I said, “Okay.” I wondered how she could type while she came.
“When can I see you?” I asked. No answer.
She’s deleted her profile, making me further doubt she was a femme switch with long blonde hair from Philly. Other prospects seem equally distant. “After the pandemic,” they say. I delete Tinder.
An acorn lands on the cabin’s roof. Squirrels pitter patter over my head. I hear the rusty hinge of the mailbox. The postal worker’s feet crunch in the gravel, but by the time I look out the window, she’s gone.
I’m wearing my worst bottom-drawer clothes, the holey t-shirt with the illegible logo that looks like a mold stain, shorts at least two decades old. My hair is witchy and Halloween-like. I move from the bed to lie on the floor for hours. The one productive thing I manage to do every day is pushups. I have a goal of achieving twenty-five pushups consecutively every day, and so far I am doing all right. When I see myself in the tiny postage-stamp of the Zoom call that I’m meant to attend for the job I’m about to lose in the city where I no longer seem to live, I push up my sleeves and look at my arms, and they’re starting to look pretty good.
I switch off Zoom. I triple-check that it’s turned off because I don’t want my work colleagues to catch me. I do a quick search and see that even porn has become medicalized during the pandemic. They’re all wearing masks and gloves (so many cavity inspections) but no condoms. One woman in a nurse’s uniform uses her feet in clever ways to avoid contact. The image blurs, and I give the internet a rest.
I can’t conjure a film in my head on my own, and past lovers are old news, nothing I want to revisit. I hadn’t planned on being hopelessly single in the middle of nowhere. I try to imagine a mystical creature emerging from a nearby wooded lake whose sole purpose is to seduce me, but I can’t imagine an actress for the role nor any other details, like what a lake creature would be wearing. Would it be something waterproof? Wouldn’t living in a lake make her skin permanently pruned? I shake my head. What the hell am I thinking? I can’t get my mind to work right. My whole body starts to burn with physiological desire independently of me, which is super annoying. I do more pushups and lie down again.
I remember the last time I tried to do this. It was years ago. It wasn’t the old showerhead trick in the bath but actual masturbation. It just seemed sad. A failure to find a mate.
When I put my hand in my underwear, I have to fight the sadness that is buried somewhere deep. Dorothy Parker named her parrot Onan after the Biblical figure who faced the wrath of God for pulling out, because her parrot, too, spilled his seed on the ground.
“What am I doing?” I say out loud to no one. I think the French call it frottage, which I confuse with fromage. It’s not erotic. I cup myself, which I sometimes do unconsciously before I fall asleep, or when I’m ill, fetal. It seems protective. Still, my body lights up with desire, with its own will, but I don’t really know how to make it feel good. I want to touch someone and for her to touch me. I hold out my arms above me to create her body and I wonder if every partner I have ever had was really just an image I created in my mind. If so, why can’t I control it? Monks nibbled on strange herbs to stop this desire.
My hand moves mechanically. My lovers had toys. I wish I had kept the purple one, but when you break up, the dicks get thrown away. When did I even have sex last? I kept a few of my ex’s shirts, but I don’t wear them because then I’ll remember how much it hurts to be alone. My chances of dating again seem null, which means I’ll never fall in love again. I’m lost. I’m miserable. I haven’t seen anyone in forever, not even to say hello. I have the groceries delivered, but the delivery people leave the boxes in the yard and sometimes items fall out onto the street. If only I could see another human being. Smell her. Just to affirm that I’m alive. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know if I’ve eaten. I’m talking to myself.
I must have fallen asleep because I’m woken up by the mailbox’s rusty squeak. I bolt downstairs.
“Wait,” I yell to the postal worker. I sprint across the yard.
She turns to me. As she opens the gate, I touch her hand. It’s warm and naked. No gloves. Real human touch. I’m starving for it. Her warmth is transmitted to me. Her face is hidden behind cloth, but her eyes are bright and gorgeous with surprise.
“Thank you,” I say, “for the mail,” but I mean for being here, in person.
She yanks her hand away from me, rightly so, and stifles a sneeze in her mask. “Don’t touch me,” she says.
I nod. She’s right. What have I done?
“Stay away,” she yells.
I stay away. I run back into the house and drop. I do so many pushups that I lose count. I give up on erotics.
***
It’s grey outside, outside of time. A week of this weather. The sun doesn’t penetrate the cloud. I’m half dreaming until one morning when I wake up horny as hell. There’s nothing subtle about it this time. If I don’t have sex I might perish. And my head hurts. My lungs hurt. I’m starving. I’m coughing. I need to have sex. I pick myself up off the floor and throw myself onto the bed and hold out my arms to trace my lover’s body in the air.
How is it that I am so full of desire, but no one is here? I’m reduced to biological function, to the need to feed and reproduce. What is the difference between me and the virus? I’ve been sweating. My head is hot. I cough into the pillow. The virus wants to replicate.
We get hornier when we’re sick. I know it. I’m tangled in the bed sheets. Every muscle in my body begins to burn.
My ex made her touch electric, the way her hand found my waist, the way she’d barely touch my skin as she ran her fingers up my legs to my back. I can feel these ghost currents now, feverish chills moving across my thighs, my buttocks, my stomach.
After we made love, I used to stare at a painting on her wall she had bought in Mexico, a folk-art piece of a naked woman engulfed by flames in front of a barred prison door. The woman held out one chained arm above her and the other to her chest, begging to be released from bondage and the fiery purgatory where she’s trapped. Anima Sola, the Lonely Soul, it said. Imprisoned woman, suffering in the flames of purgatory, alone in her abandoned dwelling. I used to look at her in curiosity or pity, but I realize now—holding out my arms, trapped in quarantine, the virus plunging me into fire— I’ve become her.
I really should call a doctor. I reach for my phone but watch it slip from my hand and slide across the room under the dresser like a skillful hockey shot. I want to retrieve it, but I’m suspended by new pain, new fatigue, short-circuiting my ability to get up or to think about anything at all but the pulses of fire moving down my chest, this virus, and where it’s taking me.
It’s too hot here in purgatory. I wrangle away from the tangled bedsheet and out of my clothes. I need to get that phone, but instead I grab my thighs to hold onto something then instinctively move my hands between my legs. All this heat brings my desire to a point of white-hot light. Anima Sola had to burn to be cleansed for heaven. I can’t resist the pleasure-pain of this moment, the need to wrangle out of my own skin. It’s turning off my brain. I’m coughing, finding it harder to breathe, but I’m getting close.
I walk naked through the forest along the dew-wet leaves that make no sound. It’s strange to be so silent, to not hear squirrels in the trees. No frightened birds fly up at my approach. I find the group in a circle, all wearing masks. I have a mask on too. One dark-haired woman points for me to lie down like a kind of sacrifice. The muddy ground is hot. I watch flames jump from my fingers. The women surround me, take off their gloves. They’re beside me now. It’s happening. To feel touch again, their hands on me, their skin on my skin. It’s finally happening. I don’t resist. The virus takes over.
Alison Wellford published the novel, Indolence, and her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Barcelona Review, Fence, and World Literature Today, among other journals. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an assistant professor of writing and the Pan-European MFA program director in creative writing at Cedar Crest College.
