Help! We Joined a Cult by Accident

Chapter 1 — Ring Light3

@solena.rising

“Here’s what nobody tells you about your forties.

This is the decade you finally meet yourself.

Six months ago I was running on cortisol, oat milk, and other people’s opinions.

Now I wake before the sun. I let the light find me.

I drink my warm lemon water like it’s a love letter to my own nervous system.

We’re not fixing ourselves, loves. We’re tending.

Drop a sunrise if you’re done just surviving.

The morning practice is in my bio, and it’s free, because healing shouldn’t gatekeep. I love you. I really do mean that.”

Here is the part that never makes the caption. For one hour every morning the lamp is mine to aim, which makes me the only person on earth whose whole job is to look at the woman who raised me and not, under any circumstances, notice her. I used to be good at my job.

It was seven forty-one, the sun up for an hour and getting no credit for it. It was the fourth take.

“The light’s wrong, Sean,” Solena said into her warm lemon water, without moving her lips much, the way she’d learned to talk while holding a smile for the camera. “The light, baby.”

I was the light. I’d been the light since seven twenty. I stood at the far end of the kitchen holding a ring lamp on a pole over my head like a man surrendering to a softer, more expensive army, and I tilted it half an inch toward her face, and the wrongness left the world.

She is, and I am only telling you this because nothing that comes after makes sense without it, a problem.

For most of my life I trained my eye to walk straight past her, and for most of my life that worked fine.

She is in her mid-forties and attractive by the impossible standards of the social media algorithm, which is to say not by my judgment but by that of forty-one thousand strangers.

She dresses for it, too, which I would rather not have noticed.

The neckline that sits a little too low to be an accident, the cotton that goes halfway sheer in the exact light she has me chase, the leggings doing the one job leggings were built for.

She engineers all of it, every morning, for the camera.

None of it used to land anywhere near me. Lately the eye slows on its way past, and I aim the light, and I do not think about it, and I think about it the entire time. That is the whole report, and I would have much rather left it out.

“There,” she breathed. “There it is. Okay. Rolling.”

She was not my mother. I want to be clear about that, because everyone who hears the shape of it assumes the worst, and the truth is duller and stranger.

She was my father’s girlfriend. She moved into our house when I was three and she never moved out, and when my dad died last year the house turned out to be hers, which surprised exactly no one except me.

I call her Mom because that’s the word for the person who packed your lunches and learned your nightmares and stayed. There isn’t a better one. I’ve looked.

The name she went by publicly was Solena. Her actual name was Deb. Deb was from Akron and laughed like a foghorn and could swear the paint off a wall. Solena drank her lemon water like a delicious potion and had forty-one thousand followers who believed she woke before the sun.

She did not wake before the sun. She woke up at seven and filmed the sun’s reputation.

“Take five,” she said brightly to the phone, then, to me, flat. “The oat milk’s separating. Get the other carton.”

“This is the other carton, Mom.”

“Then get the third lemon.”

We were on the third lemon. The first two lemons were in the compost, having failed to catch the light. I got a fourth lemon out of the bowl, because in this house we always had a bowl of lemons, the way other houses have a smoke detector, in case of emergency.

I should tell you what I do. People ask.

I used to say I was in film, which was true the way a guy holding a ring lamp is in film.

Two years of a four-year program and a passion-project short I actually cared about, the first thing I’d made that felt like mine, and then my dad died in the middle of it.

I came home for a semester and stayed, the way Mom stayed, because staying turns out to be the family talent.

I never finished the short. Never quite got the engine to turn over again, on that or anything else.

I’m twenty-seven. I shoot cheap weddings I’m not proud of and listings for a realtor named Phil, and I shoot Solena’s mornings for free.

There are things you learn against your will, editing a woman’s whole self into ninety-second clips.

I know which of the forty-one thousand are men, and which frames they’re there for, and it has never once been the lemon water.

I know the comments she leaves up, the ones she quietly deletes, and the one folder on the drive she thinks I don’t know about.

A year after the funeral I still sleep in my childhood bedroom, in my dad’s house, which is Mom’s house now, having recently been left by a woman whose exit line was that I’d turned into a houseplant.

She wasn’t wrong. The ring lamp is mine, technically, the most expensive thing I own, bought by a version of me who was going to do something with light other than aim it at lemons.

That’s the stage. Two people who stayed.

“You’re brooding,” my mother said. “I can hear you brooding. It’s very loud.”

“I’m holding the light.”

“You can do both. You’re talented.” She fluffed her hair, which was long and dark and glossy in a way that cost more than the ring lamp, and reset her face to the one with forty-one thousand friends. “Okay. Rolling. Three, two.”

Her phone rang in the middle of two.

She looked at it the way you’d look at a stranger who’d wandered into your church. Then she looked closer, and her whole body changed. I’d watched this woman receive a lot of news. I could read her like weather. This was the front coming in.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Sean.”

“What?”

“Put the light down.”

“You sure? The lemon.”

“Put the light down.” She was already across the kitchen, phone held in both hands like something newly hatched. “It’s Tidewell. They emailed me. Tidewell emailed me.”

I shrugged. I did not know what a Tidewell was. In that moment it was just a word she said like a hallelujah, and I set the lamp against the counter and looked at her face, which was doing something I hadn’t seen it do since before the funeral. It was hoping.

“It’s the retreat,” she said. “The island one. Caspian’s place. Sean, people wait years. People tithe for years. They have a Tide Bearer program, they pick like twelve creators a season, all comped, the whole thing, flights, the suite, and they emailed me. They found me.”

She pressed the phone to her chest and let out a contented sigh.

“That’s great,” I said, and I meant it, mostly, the way you mean it when someone you love is happy about something you can already tell is going to be a problem. “What is it?”

“It’s a wellness sanctuary. It’s the wellness sanctuary.

It’s on Saltren. Two weeks. All I have to do is make content.

They want me to make content. They’re paying me, basically, in the most exclusive experience of my life, to do the thing I already do for free.

” She was scrolling now, fast, her smile getting wider and then, abruptly, not, like her mouth had stalled. “Oh.”

“Oh what?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s fine.”

“That’s the same ’oh’ as the good one but worse.”

She turned the phone around so I could see it, which she only does when she wants me to share a feeling rather than have my own. The email was a lot of seafoam and serif font. She’d zoomed in on one line.

The Tide Bearer experience is designed for bonded pairs. Ambassadors are warmly invited to attend with their partner, that the work may be witnessed and held by the one who knows them deepest.

“You don’t have a partner,” I said.

“I’m aware, Sean, thank you.”

“You could tell them that.”

“I absolutely can’t tell them that.” She set the phone down very gently, which was worse than if she’d thrown it.

“You don’t write back to the wellness sanctuary that picked you out of the entire internet and say, actually, hello, I’m forty-five and I sleep alone in a house I inherited from a man I never married.

You don’t do that. They want a pair. Everyone there is a pair.

It’s the whole, it’s the polarity, the feminine-masculine balance.

I can’t show up single. I’d throw off the grid. ”

“What grid?”

“The grid, Sean.”

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t ask anything yet.”

“You’re about to. The answer’s no.”

“It’s two weeks.”

“It’s a fake relationship at a wellness scam, Mom.”

“It is not a scam, it is a sanctuary, there’s a difference, and it would be acting, you love acting, you went to film school.

” She had crossed the kitchen again and she took both my hands, which is cheating, and she knows it’s cheating.

“Baby. I have never asked you for one thing since your father died. I have asked you for zero things. I’m asking for this one.

Come be my partner for two weeks on the most beautiful island in the world and hold a different, nicer camera, and I will never make you drink the lemon water. ”

“This is insane.”

“Say yes.”

I would like to report that I put up more of a fight.

But I’d put the light down, and I was tired, and she was looking at me with the face she used to use when I was nine and she needed me to be brave about a dentist, and the kitchen still smelled like four lemons’ worth of effort, and somewhere under all of it was the part of me that had not been any use to her in a year, that had aimed a ring lamp instead of finishing a film, that had let her be the one who stayed and stayed and never once got to be the one who got found.

“They’ll figure it out in a day. You raised me. We don’t look like a couple, we look like a hostage situation.”

“We look,” she said, with enormous dignity, “like two people who’ve shared a bathroom for twenty years and stopped fighting about it. Half the couples there will look exactly the same. Say yes.”

I should have kept saying no. I had every reason lined up and ready, all of them good, and I watched myself decline to use a single one.

“Free flights,” I said.

“Free everything.”

“And I don’t have to drink anything.”

“Not a drop.”

“And the second it gets weird, we leave.”

“The second it gets weird,” she agreed, already not listening, already typing, her thumbs flying, the smile coming back up over her face like a tide, “we leave.”

I picked the ring lamp back up. Old habit. The light found her, and she looked, for one unguarded second, before Solena settled back over Deb like a second skin, completely, helplessly happy.

Two weeks, I figured. The worst that could happen was a lot of lemon water.