One day, Morgan, my girlfriend of four years, started filming me with her phone. She took it out, pressed record, and made a video of me while I was half-asleep, snoring on the futon. She showed it to me when I woke up, and I saw how my snoring was so incredibly loud and obnoxious. I felt vulnerable and embarrassed and told her I didn’t want to see the video anymore, that she should delete it. She nodded and said, “I’ll delete the vid. But you should really do a sleep study. I think you have sleep apnea, babe.”
But she didn’t delete the video. Instead, she posted it on TikTok. It got thousands of views. Tons of likes. Some people added the video to their favorites. There was a plethora of comments. Her username was tennisplaya1992. She put a caption for the video: bf snores like big ass bear. No hashtags. Didn’t even include the #fyp. No filters. No catchy pop songs played in the background. And still the video turned into a viral success. I became a famous online celebrity overnight, locally, recognized everywhere in our hometown of Alexandria, VA. And she turned into a skillful and ambitious videographer who benefitted off my notoriety. I almost broke up with her, but Morgan showed me how much money she was making from receiving a huge sponsorship from the tennis company Wilson. And that made me greedy. After I saw her bank statement, I encouraged her to take more videos for the internet, for the people, for me.
And then Morgan changed direction, and now, she started making videos of her asking me to peel a pear. I would peel the pear with a butter knife and cut it into sections, placing it on a paper plate. She did a hundred takes of me peeling a pear, but she never posted a video on TikTok. I asked her why did we spend so much time and effort on the “pear videos” when she didn’t even post it? Morgan started to cry. She slammed her fist against the kitchen table and her knuckles tore up. She yelled and threw her phone against the wall. “Do you know how hard it is to make you famous? To maintain your fame?” she asked, “I am trying to be a content creator, an influencer, a tastemaker.” She crumpled to the floor and hugged her knees, rocking back and forth. I sat down next to her and pulled her closer to me. Her head dropped in the nape of my shoulder, and I rubbed her back. “We’re going to make it. We’re going to keep being famous. We deserve the world,” I said. We ate pears for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There were so many pears.
* * *
I stopped breathing one night. I had a dream. Morgan and I were throwing pears at each other, like a water-balloon fight. We threw pears until we became tired and sticky. A pear struck me in the face, and I woke up to see Morgan hovering over me, massaging her hand. I realized she’d slapped me, and then she told me I hadn’t been breathing. I knew I had a serious problem and that I had to change something about my sleeping.
Morgan had the idea that she would take a video of me while I was on the toilet. But instead of taking a dump, I would be reading a passage from a book. I asked her what book should I be reading? “The bible,” she said, “That would be epic, plus it’s timeless.” So, I sat on the toilet and read the bible, from Genesis, Ecclesiastes, and Corinthians. When I stopped reading, I flushed the toilet. I looked up from the bible and smiled at Morgan. “How’d I do?” I asked, “Was it okay?”
The bible/toilet video went viral. We were raking in money and soon we made enough that we could afford to buy Nikon DSLR camera equipment, editing software, a microphone, and a ring light. But Morgan still preferred using a phone for making videos, she liked the camera quality, the ease of use. I would walk in Oldetown Fairfax and get stopped to sign autographs by high schoolers. I took photos with newborns. Shook hands with powerful businesspeople. Morgan stood behind me the whole time and we both watched it all happening, this newfound access to fame and fortune. She told me she was seeing herself blossom from a caterpillar to a butterfly, from an ugly duckling to a swan, from a misguided soul to a powerful woman of agency and grit. But sometimes I felt less as a boyfriend and more as a prop.
I took a nap on the futon and had a wet dream. When I woke up, my pants were wet and warm. Morgan was standing beside me with her phone out. She’d been taking a video of me, I could tell. I reached out and tried to grab the phone from her. I said, “Do not post that on TikTok. Delete it now.” She shook her head and said, “Babe we’re trying to level up. This is the video that’ll take us to that higher level. I promise you; it’s going to turn out amazing. Just trust me.” I watched as Morgan posted the video on TikTok with the caption: bf is feeling himself.
We went to the hardcourts in Burke, VA and played tennis for an hour on a Tuesday afternoon. Morgan wore a Virginia Tech hoodie, black yoga pants and scuffed up tennis shoes. I was wearing a bowler hat and a white lab coat with a fake mustache that scratched my cheeks. Before we had gone out there, I thought we were just going to play a few sets of tennis, but my girlfriend had other plans. She wanted to make another video, only for this particular one, every time she would hit a winner on me, I had to run around in my birthday suit, screaming out loud, “The money will never change a real one.”
As I got into character, I asked her why it was so important for me to scream out loud, “The money will never change a real one.” Morgan chuckled and hit the ball towards me with her racquet and said, “I got a comment on the ‘bf snores like a big bear’ video, saying that phrase and I thought it’d be cool to do a soft launch of you saying that. And then, ooohhh, we can make merch. Shirts and hoodies. Maybe even beanies. It’s the start of an empire. Couldn’t have done it without you babe.” She hit a winner on me, a crosscourt forehand into the deep righthand corner. She threw her racquet up and fist pumped.
I took off my lab coat and sprinted around the net, fixing my mustache that kept coming off, my bowler hat tilted at an irregular angle. The wind pushed against me, and I was getting my adrenaline up, as I ran around the hard courts. My flaccid penis dangled. The hairs on my legs stood up. I felt my heart accelerate, beats skipping along, one two three, one two three, one two three.
Morgan stopped filming and put her phone away, raising her finger and saying, “Cut!” I bent over a trash can and tried to vomit but nothing would come out. I put my clothes back on, chugged some blue Gatorade, and sat on an old tarnished bench, watching a hawk soar through the line of maple trees. I thought I could fly away one day, travel to another land, where nobody knew me, and bask in the solitude of it all. Not loneliness, but solitude, there was a difference, and a nuance to the words.
She captioned the tennis video: Asian male has zero decency in the digital age. I was at the gas station buying a new vape cartridge and a bag of hot Cheetos, when I checked my phone and saw her video had been posted on TikTok. There was a shitload of comments. A few likes. And many, many, many views. One of the comments said, this guy should be in prison. Another comment said, guess the stereotypes aren’t far from the truth. And there was a comment that said, fuck this Asian guy. He’s a loser fr, fr. I got depressed. For a few days, I spent all my time under the blanket, in my bed, my eyes fixated on my phone, as the views on the video accumulated in the hundreds of thousands. I was getting death threats. Hate emails. Other creators were stitching the video and calling me a pariah, a weirdo, a threat to society. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t use the bathroom until I absolutely had to use it. My mind was in a funk. But Morgan seemed happy and excited about the future, about the possibility of her fame growing and her money stacking up, and her brand becoming legitimate and successful and real af. She bought me new clothes, a new watch, and a bunch of pears.
* * *
One day, while I was eating her out on the new plush sofa, Morgan took out her phone. I thought she was going to film me. I looked up and got my face out of her lap. “Stop recording me. I’m done with this shit,” I said, grabbing her phone and smashing it against the hardwood floor. The phone bounced up and sailed across the room. She picked up her phone and kicked me in the shin. “I was checking my emails, you asshole. Babe why are you so paranoid? Not everything is a video to me,” she said, wiping the dust off her screen. She walked out of the living room and stepped out onto the back porch and lit a cigar, as though a victory had happened for her. I went to the bathroom and washed my mouth, brushing my teeth with a new electrical toothbrush.
We had bought so many new useless things with the money Morgan had made off TikTok. We were becoming not just creators, but consumers. Every day, it felt like Morgan was coming up with new ideas for new videos to go up on the internet. I was proud of her, but also, I felt afraid and exhausted of having to follow her, of having to give her consent for participating in these videos, and for allowing her to post the videos. I was not okay. And I didn’t know how to stop this mad journey of creation and consumption and recording. I missed when Morgan and I were normal people, when we didn’t have hundreds of thousands of followers, when we had our privacy and space to be ourselves and not some avatars on a screen.
I did a sleep study in Vienna, VA, and after a few weeks, I received a CPAP Machine in the mail. At night, before I went to sleep, I plugged a long gray hose into my facemask and filled the CPAP Machine with some water and turned it on. Morgan kissed me on the forehead, rubbed my face, and said, “Night, babe. Sweet dreams.” I nodded and did my best abridged impression of Darth Vader, “Morgan, I am your Daddy.” She laughed, smiled, and held me closer to her trembling body.
When I had fallen asleep, I dreamt I was floating in a huge blue lake, the water as clear as the sky after rain had come down. My head felt fine and stable. The air enveloped my face. Sunlight spread across the water in waves. And as I shut my eyes, I felt something strong and rough yanking at my ankle, pulling me underwater. I flailed my arms and tried to tread water, but I was sinking below the lake. I looked around me and all I saw was darkness. Then I saw different versions of me: I was snoring. I was peeling a pear. I was sitting on the toilet reading the bible. I was naked running around a tennis court. I was lying on the couch with disheveled sweatpants. There was a red dot blinking at me. A gigantic phone took a video of me. The last thing I saw was Morgan’s face. She flashed her teeth at me, drool spilling out the side of her mouth, her lips chapped like wax paper. I tried to yell for help but soon the water filled up my lungs and I passed out.
I woke up sweating and gasping. The sheets were damp and creased. My head started spinning. I took off my facemask and breathed slowly, letting the air course through my nose. I reached over to the nightstand and grabbed a glass of water. As I drank and calmed down, I looked at Morgan.
She was sleeping so quietly and so peacefully. She didn’t snore. Her head stayed still. I wanted to cuddle with her, but I didn’t want her to wake up. I just let her sleep. My phone’s screen lit up. It had finished charging.
I picked my phone up and held it in my hand, pointing it at Morgan like a wand. But I didn’t record her doing anything. I wasn’t an adept director. I wasn’t used to taking videos. I wasn’t addicted to posting on social media. I knew my place and I forgot how long I’d been living there, how long I’d been seeking fame, attention, the glory of being seen.
