My probation officer stopped by for a home visit this afternoon. She called beforehand, which was unusual. Typically, she drops by unannounced, on any day of the week, at any time, seemingly quarterly—what I’ve presumed is standard protocol and a way to potentially catch probationers in some act of mischief: smoking pot, oiling their gun collections, dismembering a body.

My first instinct after hanging up the phone with my PO was to take stock of the apartment—the cookbooks lying on the coffee table, the pens and papers on my desk, the clothes hanging in my closet and underwear folded in my dresser drawer—all to determine what I ought to confiscate and hide from sight. But of course there was nothing. No porn. No illicit devices. There were no more secrets to hide since getting out of prison this last time.

Twenty minutes after her call came a knock on the door, and I let Officer Calloway in. She’d come alone, which was also unusual. She almost always brought a partner, presumably for protection or training purposes. I decided this and her phoning beforehand must be signs of progress, the next stage in our relationship.

I sat on the sofa with a cup of coffee, intent on looking comfortable. She stood beside my bed in a dark jacket despite the heat. My tiny studio apartment felt even smaller with her presence.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

She ran through the usual laundry list of questions. She asked about work, my progress in sex offender treatment, whether I’d used any drugs or had any unsupervised contact with minors.

“Same, fine, no, and no,” I answered respectively.

“Have you had any deviant thoughts?”

Five so far today, I thought.

It was a question she was obligated to ask, and one which always made me grimace for the backward thinking it implied—that a person might be able to control certain thoughts, that treatment might lessen the frequency of those thoughts, that there is even an agreed-upon definition for what constitutes deviant thoughts, that we all don’t have aberrant thoughts. I answered, “Yes,” as I always did, and qualified my answer by gently reminding her that the point of sex offender treatment isn’t to control one’s thoughts—which isn’t possible—but to control one’s actions and behavior in response to those thoughts.

“And how do you,” asked Calloway, “control your actions?”

“Usually by removing myself from whatever circumstance has triggered the thought.” I gave her a recent example. Days ago I’d been having lunch at a restaurant in the city’s gay district when I looked over the shoulder of a fellow diner to see him scrolling through a hookup app on his phone.

“I saw a dick pic,” I said frankly. “So I turned my chair in the other direction.”

This seemed to satisfy her, and we continued to the second half of the home visit. We began in the kitchen. I opened the sink cabinet, pulled out the utensil drawers, the junk, spice, and Tupperware drawers. She merely nodded at each unveiling but otherwise said nothing, accept to comment, on opening the pantry, that I had a lot of pasta.

She followed me to the bathroom where I continued opening cabinets and drawers. There is a vulnerability and melancholy one feels when seeing his possessions through another person’s eyes. The glass jar of Q-tips, the rolled-up socks, the nearly empty tube of toothpaste, flattened and furled like a tongue—it all looked so sad and inconsequential, a reminder of how small one’s life is.

Back at the front door, Officer Calloway grappled futilely with the knob and then the dead bolt while thanking me for my time and asking if I had any questions or concerns.

I shook my head, as I always did, and reached to help her. “Let me get that for you; that door is tricky.”