Contradiction divides your experience as you unbutton your jeans and allow your right hand to drift below the waistband of your boxer briefs.
Physically, you are alone in your room, safe and unobserved.
But there are eyes, hundreds of eyes, watching you. Waiting.
"proud of you"
No one is here to speak the words. The message appears in the chat on the right-hand side of the stream on your laptop. Others soon join it, voiced by hands not unlike those in your pants.
"baby's first?"
"ohhh, get it newbie"
"hope it's good"
"maybe I'll have a go"
"yeah let's keep them company"
Right hand still barely transgressing, playing, ever so tentatively, with soft curls of hair, your left returns to the keyboard to say:
"yall really do this?"
Permission, sought one last time. And granted.
"yeah dude it's in the name"
Your eyes dart from the chat to the webpage title. "Lofi Pomodoro for Needy Ghosts - study & come with me." Alongside the chat is a feed of Welms, sitting at her desk in Lofi Girl cosplay, idly nodding her head to the gentle chillhop she's playing, occasionally turning the pages of the tome she's poring over.
There is nothing sexual about what Welms is doing. She's just running a coworking broadcast on an indie Twitch knockoff, prepping for the LSAT. But while many use this space to study with her, the coming part is equally embedded in the culture.
You haven't felt this horny since the fires.
The world pretended to go back to normal, after, but you couldn't deny the shift. You'd changed, in quarantine.
Now when you try to connect with people, you feel something dreadful lapping against your ankles, and your words clog your throat, and you hate being you, not who you are but what you are: a human, electricity pulsing through flesh wrapped around bone, the animal most capable of ending itself on philosophical grounds—
"still with us hon?"
The words break your reverie. You aren't human, not here. You are a ghost in the fiber, a digital whisper, mercurial sentience on the internet. There is nothing wrong with your body or your species because you have neither, only soul and words and need.
Your hand dips deeper, ignites the dormant heat at your core. Your heart catches in that way you used to like, with lovers.
"yeah," you type back.
Contradiction deepens as arousal flushes you. It is impossible to pleasure yourself without feeling your flesh, sensing heat and the flow of blood, enjoying the shift of tickle to tingle to titillation. But simultaneously you are nothing, you are empty; you have neither pussy nor cock to manipulate, nor hand to touch. You exist in the words on your screen, in the keen observation of your fellow ghosts, all of whom want you to feel good without needing to feel embodied.
"i'm getting close," one of them says.
When you first found this stream, it seemed like a joke. A prank. No way people are just jacking it in a lofi channel and reporting to the class. But if it's a fantasy, it's definitely shared, and you're here, now, living it. The body you don't need to have swells with sensation. You feel more connection to your fellow ghosts than you've felt with a Tinder fling in years. Touching yourself in the darkness of your room, occasionally typing, "yeah, still going, feels good," listening to the chillhop playlist and watching Welms study, you are immersed in an intimacy so casual it is finally accessible.
One of your fellow ghosts taps out. "not feeling it tonight," they say, "yall have fun."
Another reports a successful orgasm.
Several others offer gentle congratulations.
You're soaking through your steaming underwear. You need to disrobe, leave a towel on your chair as you lean toward your screen and drool on your mouse pad. Masturbation never feels like this; it's solitary, chill, dreary. This is exhilarating, incandescent, communion. It's sex. Sex with a hundred people through the internet, consummation of your membership in this strange little community.
"i bet the newbie's almost there," someone says.
Somehow the encouragement is fundamentally different from jerk off instructions or erotic roleplay. No one speculates about body parts, no one expresses prurient interest, no one participates. The supportive comments merely develop a sense of proximity: sexual body doubling.
You can do this.
You can have your needs met, in the aether, floating on rhythmic waves of music, surrounded by your ethereal peers.
You come.