SOMACAGE

Youth is a currency and he's running out of it. In Atlanta's Midtown, a forty-something gay man becomes consumed by the need to prove he's still desirable.

I JOG BENEATH the oaks of Piedmont Park, chest tight with the first of three workouts I force myself through daily. Religiously. People say I look good for my age. I nod like I’m gracious but inside I’m dying. GOOD FOR WHO? GOOD WHERE? SHOW ME ON THE DOLL. Because in my mind good is never good enough. Not for me. And damn sure not for the congregation of gay men who worship at the temple of youth and muscle.

Where I live in Midtown, I can’t escape them. Patios bloom with shirtless twunks leaning over sweating iced coffees. Billboards along Peachtree beam with impossible bodies frozen mid-flex. Rainbow flags ripple from storefronts, waving for everyone but me. Pride, sure. But it’s pride for only the beautiful ones. The rising sunlight makes halos of all this. It mocks me without even noticing me.

I finish and drift toward the café. The doorbell chimes as I step into a hive of chatter and clinking porcelain. My shirt clings damp to my chest. I tug at it, too aware of eyes I imagine circling me like mosquitos.

Then I see him.

A beautiful man across the room locking eyes with me. My stomach does Gabby Douglas flips. I rehearse what I’ll say. I have Danny at home, yes. But being seen still matters. Being desired still matters.

The man struts towards me. My heart leaps. Then it shatters. Because he sails right past me, straight into the arms of someone hotter. Someone younger.

I shift, suddenly exposed. Everyone’s a bad bitch until they meet the baddest I guess. I pull my bag across my stomach to shield the soft place I hate the most. I leave without my coffee. My feet barely touch the ground as I rush home.

After work I dive into part two of my ritual: the gym. A chamber of mirrors and machines. I sit with dumbbells, curling them with monk-like obsession. My reflection betrays me. My arms flex, yes, but my eyes drift to my belly, my graying hairline. Another birthday looms in the distance. A finish line I wish I could breeze past.

Forty-four. Such a strange in-between age.

I reach for my phone. Doomscrolling is part of the ritual now. The screen bombards me with workout advice for older men that quickly blurs into another distraction. The hookup app Danny doesn’t know about. He doesn’t need to know. Because it isn’t for sex. It’s for proof of existence.

I scroll even though I feel fossilized.

Once, attention came freely like sun on skin. Now every hello feels like a contract I didn’t agree to. Every glance is weighed against the currency of youth. They ask if I’m “Gen,” code for whether I’ll pay for sex. Guys who aren’t even the type become rent boys if I so much as look at their profiles. It’s assumed now: at my age, if I want attention, I must pay for it.

I see the face from the coffee shop. Each of his photos gleam and I can’t look away.

I let the dumbbells clatter to the floor. My reflection in the mirror seems warped. I leave the gym early, body taut, every nerve screaming. The familiar cocktail of envy, desire, and inadequacy stings on my tongue. Like a poison I mistake for water. I drink it every day and I am still thirsty.

My partner Danny is nine years younger though most days it doesn’t matter. We have built a life together. But the ticking of the clock yells at me even in our quiet moments. I see the years piling on me, while Danny still shines, unmarked. And I cannot stop noticing the difference.

We share the mirror in the soft glow of the bathroom light. I fuss with my shirt, twisting it over my belly, wishing I could will perfection into my body. I spot another gray hair. I pinch it and sigh loud enough for Danny to notice. He knows to talk me down from ledges before I even get up there.

“Growing old is a blessing,” he teases. “Plus a salt and pepper beard is sexy,” he adds.

“Says the young one,” I scoff.

“Says the logical one,” he corrects. “I mean, babe, what’s the alternative to growing old?”

“Dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse,” I murmur.

He wraps his arms around my waist. And tilts our mahogany faces to meet the reflection in the mirror.

“I love my lil morbid Scorpio,” he says.

The warmth doesn’t chase the creeping vanishing of relevance that is on the way to me.

The table rocks with chatter. Marcy is already halfway through a story. Gabriella steadies her with a palm pressed gently against her knee. Danny is swept up in it all. He’s laughing, sketching bright arcs through the air with his arms as if painting the night itself.

I sit back, tasting the salt on the rim of my glass, watching the light crawl over Danny’s face. I watch him the way one watches the edge of a candle flame, steady, lovely, and dangerous to touch.

I figure he sees me the same way, a candle flickering out.

“My aunt left my uncle,” Danny tosses into the circle, grin widening with the tiny scandal. “He got one of those Veris Forms. Midlife thing blew the whole marriage to pieces.”

Marcy perks up. “Which model?”

Danny shrugs.

“If it’s the new Pro models, I get it,” Marcy mutters. “They’re…lk terrifying.”

Danny tilts his head. “If they’re so terrifying why you keep clocking in?”

Marcy barks a laugh, bright and sharp, then loops an arm tight around Gabriella. “Rent won’t pay itself,” she says, kissing Gabriella’s temple. “Plus, somebody’s gotta keep this one spoiled.”

The table bursts into light laughter. Everyone but me. Their voices ebb and surge, but I have already drifted elsewhere. Across the patio I catch sight of a cluster of men. Their torsos gleam under mesh tank tops. Their smiles are exact replicas, their jawlines carved from the same machine dream.

My seeing of them is not a seeing. It is a remembering of absence. A reminder of what I lack. I remember being that young, sweating through clothes not made for eternity but for the heat of dancing. For the salt of another boy’s shoulder in a club that pulsed with bass. I remember believing the night itself was watching me, rooting for me, holding me aloft.

Marcy’s voice drags me back to the table.

“Listen, do what you gotta do to feel good in your body. But stop trying to act like them bodies are built in a gym. They’re built in a lab.”

She looks at all of us.

“We had so many people wiped out in the AIDS years. People who would have killed to have the chance to grow old. Now the gays out here buying youth to keep from growing old. It’s maddening.”

Gabriella rolls her eyes. “Here you go.”

“Yeah here I go,” Marcy shoots back.

Then she looks at me. “Good thing our generation missed that huh?”

We keep speaking like we are whole. We pretend. We keep talking. But the thing Marcy says, about those who “would kill to grow older,” it lodges in me like a seed.

It will grow and it will not be pretty.

That night, I dream I’m in a room with endless mirrors. My body stretches like dough. My face melts. I run through the corridors of glass and my own reflection fractures and multiplies.

I wake in a cold sweat. Before thought can catch me, I throw myself to the floor. My palms grind into the carpet. One, two, three, I count in silence. The pushups feel less like exercise and more like penance.

Danny stirs awake. “Babe, it’s two o’clock. Come back to bed.”

I don’t answer at first. I keep lowering. Rising and lowering again. As though if I stop my body might dissolve and collapse into the years I keep trying to outrun.

Finally, between gasps, I mutter, “In a bit.”

Danny rolls over and is back to sleep in minutes. The room goes quiet again except for the soft rhythm of his breathing and my counting.

Forty.

Forty-one.

Forty-two.

Forty-three.

The next morning my feet drum the pavement. At the café door, I collide with a body, spilling coffee across the sidewalk. Words tumble between us, clumsy and fumbling.

The stranger lowers his shades. “Trevor?”

“Do I know you?” I manage.

He smiles and lifts the shades. “It’s me. It’s J.”

I squint. “Jeffrey?”

Memory claws up from the grave in my mind. Almost fifteen years gone. The breakup folded neatly into “timing.” The truth: Jeffrey had been balding, softening, expanding, tumbling toward middle age like a stone down a hill. And I had left him to gravity and the slow slide of inevitability. Now here he is, skin gleaming, hair thick, abs sculpted as if by some divine hand.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” I ask.

Jay speaks with calm certainty. There’s no blame. No trace of the years I thought had mattered.

“That experience actually sent me on a journey of self-love,” he tells me.

I watch his lips. The way his hands curl around the cup. The strange precision of his jawline. He is Jeffrey but not Jeffrey. The ghost of the boy I kissed in stairwells, who whispered my name into the dark, has been poured into this brighter vessel.

And in kind he notices me noticing him.

A blush spreads across his polished cheekbones.

“You always were a shy one,” he says. “Go ahead, ask me.”

The words jam in my throat. “I—I didn’t want to be rude.”

“It’s a Veris Form,” he beams. “I just upgraded to the Pro model.”

“Is it strange? Undoubtedly,” he goes on, “but for me it’s like a second youth. And we gays need that, ya know?”

His eyes catch the café light, an artificial twinkle, a manufactured starlight. “We spend most of our adolescence in the closet, pretending, This—” he lifts his hand as if to show the air itself, “this is made for us.”

I cannot speak.

“Your birthday’s coming up, ain’t it?” he asks calmly.

I nod.

He leans in. “Maybe a second youth is the perfect birthday gift to yourself.”

“Maybe,” I whisper.

But inside I am already contemplating.

I wake with the nightmare still marred in my mind. Danny sleeps beside me. I watch the slow rise and fall of him like a tide. I leave the bed carefully as if lifting a sleeping child from a cradle.

My phone blinks across the nightstand. The clock switches to 4:44 a.m. The numbers call me, curling at the edges of reason, and I reach, drawn like a moth circling Prometheus’ flame.

I doomscroll.

The hookup app slides past profiles until an ad forces itself between them. An orchestral version of “Forever Young” plays. A warm voice climbs out of the phone.

I am not held hostage by my own biology.

My body is clay.

My face is a canvas.

This is not fantasy.

This is Veris Form™ Pro by Soma Labs.

My youth is not behind me, it is forever ahead.

A faceless, flawless body rotates on the screen. Sliders appear and the mesh body morphs in a breath. Muscles sharpen. Hair thickens. Age unspools backward. The man on the screen is less a person than the answer to a question I’ve been asking in secret.

“Trevor?” Danny’s voice cuts through the room.

He leans in at the doorframe with sleep still pooling in the corners of his eyes.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of getting one of those,” he says.

“I need to look fab for my birthday,” the words tumble out before I can stop them.

“You already do, Trev,” he says, voice firmer now.

He shakes his head slightly as he goes upstairs. “Come back to bed.”

The ad pulses at me. My fingers hover over the button. I think of Danny, of mirrors that have never agreed with me, of the parties and crowds I want to be younger for.

And I tap, ADD TO CART.

The package arrives in a white slab of a box. There’s minimal type on the lid. Which figures because consumer tech learned to whisper promises instead of shouting them. I peel the seal. The top lifts with a magnetic click that sounds like a transaction finalizing.

And there, nestled in foam and tissue, is my new body. I pull it all away and jump. The thing inside is the shape of a man, but its face is a blank surface. It is almost obscene in its quiet perfection.

Beneath the body there’s a small envelope with instructions printed on heavy paper. The language is clinical and gentle all at once.

1. Upload consciousness into the Veris Form Pro via the Soma Labs Neuralink app.

2. Discard previous body according to local guidelines.

Discard. The word is so small for something so final.

I close my eyes.

I open them and I am somewhere else. My thoughts flow without anchor. I am a sky of memory with no ground. Then sensation hits me in waves: a settling, weight presses and pulls me into form.

I flex fingers that feel new. There are no old aches. No soft places to hide. I stagger to the mirror and frighten myself. I see, not a face, but a template: the blank canvas the ad promised.

I open the Soma app on my phone.

I shift the sliders and play with them a bit. Cheekbone +2.4. Click. Jawline -1.1. Click. Each adjustment sends a near-instant frame update: my mesh morphs, skin textures repaints in a carousel that makes me dizzy with possibility.

Then the UI presents a preset: Youth 21.

I click and I watch myself settle. The numbers tick down and then stop. The face that stares back at me from the glass is a younger model of myself pulled from uploaded archives. I have been updated. I am young again.

My eyes drift first to my body, my old body.

And then to the empty packaging, gleaming as though some god of commerce has lent me a coffin. I lower myself and not myself inside.

I have never seen myself like this, not really. Mirrors give me only angles and half-truths. Phone cameras are for the photogenic. But now with new eyes, I see myself the way you see a sunset for the first time, whole and blindingly honest. I press a hand to his cheek. He’s warm but already cooling. The lines at the corners of his eyes, the soft arc of his belly are all proof that once I lived as a mortal man.

Proof that I was loved in this form.

For one ridiculous instant I expect the eyes beneath the lid to open and look at me. To accuse me perhaps. Or forgive me. They do not. I want to kiss his forehead, but I don’t. I just close the lid. Like the last page of a book I will never open again.

I set the box at the curb.

Tomorrow the trucks will come to claim him. The landfill will open its jaws, iron teeth grinding memory to dust. I turn and leave as if it were someone else’s body I just dumped at the curb.

When Danny comes home I am in the living room moving with the delighted shock of a child in a grown man’s suit.

He pauses in the doorway. Something like a bruise of hurt blooms across his face. He walks the small distance between us like he is learning a new map.

“Trev?” his voice is the same voice I hear in the dark when he calls my name, but now threaded with surprise. “What did you do?”

I try to laugh it off because laughter is easier.

“It’s my body,” I say. My voice sounds small in the large room. “I paid for it.”

“You paid for it,” he repeats softer.

“Yes. I mean, you did. But we’re in a relationship, babe.” His hand gestures. “You made this huge choice without telling me.”

He steps closer and reaches out. His fingers hover over the muscle of my arm as if it might be contagious.

“We promised, remember? We decide big things together. And this, this is huge.”

“You have no idea,” I joke.

But he’s not in the mood for my brand of comedy. I feel that old shame prick me.

“I—” I begin and find no words that don’t sound like shitty excuses.

“You look amazing,” he says, backing away from me.

That night I don’t sleep.

I feel less need for it somehow. This body hums with a clean, new currency. Danny climbs into bed and rolls over away from the empty space where I used to be. I kiss his cheek and head downstairs.

I start with pushups. My breath is even and efficient. No old joints to complain. I count in a whisper: one, two, three, four. The clock tick-tocks. I push until my arms tremble with that beautiful ache, proof I am still alive, just new.

In the morning, I run my old route, but now the city runs with me.

The sun gilds my skin and every sidewalk becomes a little altar where strangers offer me worship in the form of glances. At the café, the barista sees me coming and hands me my drink without charge.

“On the house,” she says.

I feel like a comet.

At the gym I curl dumbbells and watch myself the whole time. I practice angles. I rehearse smiles. I taste the reveal on my tongue already. Soon I will unveil this body. My birthday, not a birthday, my rebirth will eat!

On the walk home the city feels like a stage. And then, I see Jeffrey at the other end of the street. My chest swells with eagerness to reveal my new self.

But something is wrong.

For a heartbeat the air bends and I see not bronze perfection but my familiar sagging flesh. A face that is mine, ghosted across the glass of this new mask.

I bolt the other way from Jeffrey. Home is a sprint. I shove open the door, fling myself to the mirror and there I am. Smooth. Perfect. Young.

Danny watches me like I’ve arrived in his house as some new species. In that look I hear every unasked question: where did the man I loved go?

I slide my smile into place and it almost fits.

We sit at the table with his laptop open between us. We scroll through old photos for my birthday slideshow. Scenes of my old body flash across the screen. Me with cheeks heavier than memory allows. Me with a soft belly pressing against a shirt that once fit loose.

“How come you didn’t tell me I was getting so out of shape?” I ask Danny.

“Because I love you regardless,” he says.

I flick my gaze back to the screen. The photos pulse. For a heartbeat, the glossy black edge catches my face.

It is not gleaming. Not perfect. I’m glitching. Reverting toward the blank Veris Form default.

Danny taps a photo from Bulldogs years ago. “You remember this night?”

I do remember.

Heat. Drinks. The music vibrating through our bones. His hand locked in mine. But the memory slips, eclipsed by the faceless shimmer in the screen.

I shake my head and it flickers back. “Yeah,” I say.

Danny’s smile falters. He tilts his head, watching me, not the photos.

Danny wakes me with cake. He’s smiling so earnestly, like our world is still ordinary. I applaud him for that.

He sets the plate on my lap. “Happy birthday Trev.”

I look at the frosting, bright, supermarket red against pale sponge and I feel nothing. No tug in my stomach. Just a hollow refusal. My appetite is gone, switched off like every other unnecessary function.

“Make a wish,” Danny smiles.

I don’t though. I already have everything I want.

The air of my party sparks with champagne flutes and camera flashes. A step-and-repeat stretches along one wall, banners bouncing the glow of bulbs back into the room. My cake sits in the middle like a small monument.

Forty Four, a number I both own and fear.

Friends and family fill the house. Their laughter ricochets off the walls. Over them an early 2000s pop track Danny queued up to make me laugh throbs.

I bask in it all.

Their eyes on me. The gasps and whispers as I glide into the room.

“Damn, Trevor, you look unreal.”

“You ain’t aged a day.”

“You look so young.”

Hands reach for me. They orbit me like planets around a blazing sun. This is what the Veris Form promised: a newness that draws people close.

Danny leans in the kitchen doorway watching me, arms crossed, a smile curving his lips but not reaching his eyes.

I take Danny’s hand and we move across the floor. He smiles but I see it there, his quiet worry. The question of how much of me is still me. How much is purchased perfection now? A man in borrowed youth, walking a floor that remembers the weight of the body I left behind.

The slideshow flickers above the buffet, images of old birthdays, old faces, old me. My eyes catch my own reflection mid-transition: a cheek too full, a jaw too sharp, a skin tone that skips like a corrupted frame. The world hiccups, and suddenly the music warps, the glittering lights wobble. I press a hand to my temple.

“I—” I mutter, and the floor tilts beneath me.

Danny’s hand tightens around mine, but I’m already pushing through the crowd. Past laughing loved ones who toast to me in my oblivion.

The bathroom door slams behind me. I stare at the mirror. I blink and the image shifts again: old and young, me and not me. My new face catches the light. Smooth. Alive. Perfect. Relief rises in my chest. For a brief, impossible second, I am whole.

Then I hear a voice. “Hey birthday boy.”

It’s Jeffrey.

“Feels weird don’t it?” He grins as his eyes scan me.

I nod. “It’s like I wasn’t even alive before this.”

“You’ll get used to not sleeping and not eating,” he tells me. “But the sex makes up for it.”

I look down in shame. He catches it.

“You haven’t even—” He gestures crudely. “Tested it out.”

I blush. A silly little mix of embarrassment and curiosity.

“No,” I admit. “Not yet.”

His grin sharpens.

We slip down the narrow hall into the spare room and close the door behind us.

Jeffrey’s hands grip my waist.

I hesitate.

My chest tightens, part of me is still tethered to the world beyond this room. But the relief of seeing my new face, the thrill of the untouched perfection, it propels me forward.

His lips are on mine.

There’s a flicker of doubt, but the mechanical response of the body takes over, and I melt into it. The kiss deepens. My mind drifts as I watch myself as if from a distance.

The door opens. Danny stands in the threshold taking in the scene: my shirt half-open, Jeffrey’s hand still at my waist.

Jeffrey pulls back. He mutters an apology and slips past Danny and out the door.

Danny stands there with his eyes searching mine, trying to understand the man he loves.

I put my hand on his shoulder. Danny jerks himself free and takes a step back.

“You wanted to be new so badly, Trevor. Well, congratulations.” He throws his hands into the air, voice rising. “You got the perfect body, but in your mind you’re still that same teenage fag who didn’t get enough attention in the club!”

I flinch.

His words slice deeper than any scar. I reach for him again, but he shakes his head, and slams the door behind him.

I stare at the mirror, at the reflection I bought.

I waltz back into the party like nothing happened. It’s mine after all. The crowd still glows, still reaches for me, still orbits me. My smile is stiff and my laugh glitches. In the shadow of Danny’s absence, for the first time I feel the emptiness of perfection.

These days the apartment is quiet without Danny.

His absence is a sound of its own. I move through the motions. The rituals are mine, yet these days they feel stitched from someone else’s choreography. A script I learned from another life.

Outside, the city presses close, full of strangers. But every eye feels like it knows the seam in my mouth, the wrinkle that waits to rise, the scar beneath my skin that no serum can smooth.

At the café, the barista’s hands pass me my drink without her usual smile.

At the gym, men avert their eyes from the mirror as if my reflection could infect theirs.

I keep moving. Past the fountain, past couples sprawled on the grass. I log the macros. Swipe through Veris update after update. I pretend I don’t see Danny’s face in my notifications, learning to live life again, unburdened by me.

I pause before a storefront. Neon slices the glass into fractured angles. My reflection stares back.

The surface quivers. My face splits like a cracked photograph. Youth and age overlay, each fighting to claim the same space. The old me exhales against the glass. The man who has lived, who has loved, who has been loved, who has hurt and failed and forgiven. Belly soft beneath a shirt that has held decades. And for the first time, I do not recoil. People pass. Their reflections pass over mine.

Nobody notices. Nobody sees.

I lift my hand to the glass. The old hand meets it. I close my eyes and let it anchor me. Then my reflection collapses back into the perfect mask of youth and light.

The man the world wants.

The man Danny cannot love.

I stare into that nothing where the other face had been. All that remains is the reflection that answers back and it is only surface.

Yes, I am perfect. But I am alone.