Carry On

by Angela Townsend

I need you to carry me today, because I am heavy in my own hands. I see it in the eyes I intend to fill with light. It is easy to recognize when someone galumphs with great purpose. I am obvious and exhausting.

I blame you when I get this tired. You were the one who gave me lenses for the yearning. I hear it in the half-pause after “good morning.” I feel it coming off the plumber like humidity. It paces between paragraphs and hides Easter eggs in ellipses. It leans on the jamb of my door and tells me more than anyone should. It hides between stiff noodles in the “ramen closet” at work.

You gave me parents – two out of two – who made it easy to believe in a loving God. You broke the news that this was rare. You gave my mother the idea to put neon index cards in my lunch box:

“To whom much is given, of her much is asked. - Jesus”

“You gotta fight for your right to party! – The Beastie Boys”

You gave my father the urge to sing carols in and out of season, repeating and repeating and repeating the sounding joy.

I do not believe you gave me Type 1 diabetes and its several backup singers when I turned nine. I believe you stationed six-winged angels in seraphic shift work, or else my autoimmune inferno would burn even hotter. I believe you could have prevented it. I believe you are unhappier than I am about it. I believe my book of lamentations is slimmer than most. I don’t presume to understand how any of this works.

I presume to tax my unexcused absences. I hide in my hoodie. I miss game nights that bond people. I glob on crazy glue. I hand-write fluorescent encouragement and decorate tenderness with stickers. If people remember that I remember their birthdays, maybe they will forget that I missed their parties. I want to love people well. I don’t feel well.

I want to come for the grieving like a Gospel choir. I want to send a song as my proxy.

When I tug myself downstairs, I get ambitious. I am an epiphany factory when people just want to be people. A coworker at the animal shelter asks, “does the new cat have any special needs?” I grab an exclamation point and pole vault from zero to epic in one second.

“Doesn’t every living creature have special needs? Isn’t it a relief?”

They smile at me the way you would a child who has just memorized her own zip code. They smile at me, and I see their upcoming cardiology visit, and their child’s start date at a residential school, and their decision to cancel all the online dating accounts.

I buy paint markers and write you are so irrevocably loved on river rocks. I hide them in my boss’s desk and the ramen closet before going home to recover. I write exegeses of Beatitudes and disguise them as blog posts about cats with special needs. I am not hiding anything.

My friends pat my head, and acquaintances take hold of my ankles. Night brings fifteen notifications. Facebook Messenger glows red like the eye of Sauron. “I don’t know how I would get through a day without your blog.” “My uncle has a hernia. Will you ask your people to pray?” “I print out your emails and put them in a binder.” I respond while eating a granola bar for dinner.

I am not sure how long I can keep this up. I cannot turn it off. I wonder if I need a factory reset. I tell people I will pray for them and forget. I tell myself that the promise is the prayer.

I tell myself that I am full of purpose, not pride. I tell myself that your hand guides my fingers as I bullet-point lists of People To Comfort This Weekend. I wake up jealous of my tabby cat’s peace treaty with his life. I wonder if I could have Sunday off from checking the Birthday List. I can’t stomach the thought of Sunday people going uncelebrated.

You know what no one who has been born can know. You know that affection and absolution bubble in the same tub, and I have given up trying to tell the difference. I am feathers and bones inside this pink hoodie. I am a naked cat trying on cowls. Red ink runs like a highway map over my autoimmune errors. I am too tired to be a person in person. I try to pay for my absence in exuberance, but I can’t count out the right change. I make it into the world one day a week, then spend six recovering. I have scrambled the Sabbath.

Your hand is the only thing large enough to hold me. When I am sickly serious, you throw me overhead and catch me in the other hand. You send my long-haired tabby to chase her own tail around the cat pole until I catch myself singing “Private Dancer” and realize you are in on the joke. You allow my Birthday List to have a “fatal file error” so I miss the Board Chairperson’s 60th. When her card slouches in late, she responds: “even better! You extended the birthday season!” You send me something called Socks To Stay At Home In™ via the friend I thought judged me like Marie Antoinette.

You send me a Christmas card with patchy goslings singing “Joy to the World,” even though it is March. “Totally out of season. I just thought you would dig this,” my coworker writes. It is morning. I can repeat the sounding joy. I will tuck neon notes between blocks of ramen.

---

Angela Townsend is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, The Normal School, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and writes for a cat sanctuary. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.