The Wrong Ride

by Angela Townsend

Like most humans, senators, and higher mollusks, I have a sprawling amusement park inside my cerebrum.

When I am angry, I ride the Ferris Wheel over and over until it’s safe to come down.

When I am carbonated, I ride the ponies and pretend I am one of Tolkien’s inimitable women.

Rather too often, I ride the roller coaster, irrational loops of lies.

I have a self-deprecating form of OCD, which manifests in refrigerator rigidity, daily disinfectant derbies, and the demanding hobby of entertaining unpleasant possibilities.

They come by the dozens, lordly and dressed for dinner. They are highborn in pearls and brooches, genteel and authoritative. When I flutter out of the kitchen with their French onion soup, they raise eminently reasonable topics:

Shall we deep-dive into diabetic retinopathy?

Wouldn’t it be wise to contemplate the discontinuation of my favorite yogurt?

Darling, hasn’t it been too long since we played the parlor game of That Conversation Last Wednesday?

And if we wish to be responsible, surely we must ride The Summoning after dessert.

Oh yes, The Summoning.

The tallest roller coaster in my brainscape, this favorite looper gives me indigestion dressed as inevitability. All the persnickety obsessions and opinionated possibilities don their velvet collars and opera gloves to watch me ride, waving hankies from the ground below. This is their hour.

If I’m not careful, this is every hour.

While other fears take breaks to run their feary errands and do their anxious laundry, The Summoning is always with me. It has backup generators. It runs all night. It runs me ragged.

It runs like this: you will be repossessed.

You will be stripped of your sweet schedule.

You will be summoned back to the office.

Never mind that your pandemic-born pattern has been quilted into your job description. Never mind that you and your longsuffering boss have had a half-dozen conversations about this, up to and including his lending you Buddhist books to stop worrying about it.

Never mind that you have proven, striven, driven your little car to the top of the “oh” to show every living beast that it’s best for you and the cat sanctuary and perhaps the entire mammalian kingdom to do this forever.

The loops present theses and bibliographies.

Microsoft is calling its people back. Even your Buddhish boss pays attention to societal trends.

Harvard Business Review says the remote work revolution is over. Your peace is a fading fossil.

Your colleagues and cohorts and skeptical strangers shall collectively rise up and resent your sweet, sweet, self-indulgent schedule.

You are an awfully self-indulgent little looper.

Helpless to rebut them, I ride ‘round and ‘round, queasy and sore afraid.

Why am I so afraid of this?

It’s no single thing, and it’s every gentle thing. It’s the atomic productivity powered by this cell, my star-throwing strength in the cosmos of my condo. It’s the energy I don’t have for long days of small talk. It’s the writing that won’t come anywhere but here. It’s the freedom to hydrate and hide and deal with diabetes and dizziness unobserved.

It’s the liturgy of long hours, fifty or sixty a week, all of them wanted and warm, as long as I can be here.

Please don’t make me leave here.

I have never known the peace of not having to fake feeling well. I have never had so much to give, in ways that feel so close to okay.

I have never worked so hard and so happy. I have never felt so safe and so strong, even when my body baffles me. I have never produced so much, connected with so many people, worked with my own weariness so collaboratively.

And Wednesdays! Oh, cruel loops, don’t you see how I wield my Wednesdays? My weekly “in-house” day is a gasping gallop, distilled weeks of social sweetness and madcap sunbeaming as I hurl myself through that building. I bolster every bond. I manage every meeting. I make the most of eight exhausting hours, and the coda is a collapse that makes me feel like a conquering queen.

It takes me two days to recover.

But the obsessions narrow their eyes and stop waving their hankies. The loops grow steeper, sharper, assembling attorneys in my creaky car.

You did this before. You worked ten years on-site. What changed?

You have diabetes, not dysentery. Other diabetics climb Everest and ride ponies and serve on the Supreme Court. Why can’t you hack it?

You’re weak and selfish. But you already knew that. Also, everything is dirty. Go disinfect something.

By this point, I’m thoroughly infected.

I know the carnival ditties. I know there’s not a rational ride on the premises. I know my arguments sound as invalid as a cotton candy salad. I know my fears could come true, and it wouldn’t be the first time. I believe it wouldn’t be the last of me.

There is no reasoning with this ride. But there is another ride.

I’ve been looping for a lifetime, and there’s always Someone waiting for me at the bottom, weaving through the pack of possibilities and all those ogling obsessions. He takes me, trembling, out of the car. He carries me out of the park, out of the party, out where the sky is big again.

He hands me a ticket to The Ecliptic.

If The Summoning makes me sick and apoplectic, The Ecliptic takes me somewhere safer than my condo, safer than the sacred writ of my routine.

The Ecliptic is the plane of the earth around the sun, the ride we can’t reject, the route that runs with stars and secrets.

The Ecliptic is inevitable.

The Ecliptic is astronomy turned prophet, the terrible promise that anything can happen, but everything will be okay.

The Ecliptic offers no guarantees, only dawns.

Surely goodness and mercy follow creaky little cars across The Ecliptic.

And if the things I think I need are eclipsed by the light that needs no argument, I will ride safe against a background of stars.

I am weak, but I am summoned by love.

It’s safe to come down.