The car grinds to a steady halt. You’re at the top. You notice the air feels a little thin at the top, and its as if everything inside of you has tensed up in anticipation.
This is not your first roller coaster.
You aren’t quite used to the feeling, but you know what is coming. There is that pinching feeling that feels a lot like it is full of the prickly stems you weren’t supposed to touch when you were a child (but did anyways). You feel the pull of the car jerk back to life, as you reach the point of descent.
It is as if everything around you pauses for an eternity. You know there is a perfectly well engineered track to keep the car in place and glide safely to the bottom. However, in that one fleeting moment, you wonder ‘Is it really there?’ ‘What if this is the one time it fails?’
Then the panic sinks in.
The sneaky suspicious panic that creeps up like a vine over the side of an aged house. The panic you thought you had conquered with the simple gesture of buckling the flimsy seatbelt. That perfectly nauseating feeling hits you of falling clear out of the sky. You feel lunch at the back of your throat, grasp the safety bars a tighter, and hold on for dear life. You know at this point there is no escaping the helplessness you feel when you will begin to fall, the jostling that will ensue after the drop, the words that will escape your mouth as if they were the most obscene haiku ever written.
That’s when it hits you, that penultimate thought that makes sense of the panic and justifies the fear….
“Why am I even on this ride?”
-B
Post Grad Stress Disorder 