How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

There’s never enough time. Actually, there’s too much and too little, in unequal parts. More than enough of time passing but not enough of the time passed.

My mind is almost always elsewhere.

You can wish as hard as you want for something to stay, but it will slip right through you, drift to the bottom of you as you stand, watching, watery, logged, bleating bloated blubbering, doing and holding nothing.

And it’s so clear how far I have fallen. How far I am from where the stars are.

Things change in an instant—one minute a mountain, solid and immoveable. The next, the land drops out. Trees collapse and tumble. The landscape slides into a mess of scars.

It’s so easy, isn’t it? For everything to change. On/off. Love/hate. Alive/dead.

Grief feels like this: an okay day and a good day and an okay day then a bad. Bad that follows and empties you. Bad like a sinkhole.

It feels like a night of vivid dreams, and when you wake, all day you hold one dream close because in it everything was back to how it once was.

It feels like you’ve fallen overboard. You are swimming to get back, but the boat moves steadily away. You can see the lights; you can hear the laughter and the music on the decks. You try to follow. The boat moves away.

You miss and miss and miss and miss and miss. And all you want to do is walk into a forest and cover yourself with leaves.

Why are you so sad and empty when you have a house with walls and a roof and people who love you?

I stand in the shower and fall from the showerhead onto myself. I pour into the drain, under earth, out into the ocean, spilling.

No more lying in bed and not moving. No more floating.

It’s a constant adjustment, isn’t it, to survive?

Am I better? Can you be better when you’re still sad—long patches of sad swooping in at night when there aren’t any sounds to cover it? Are you better when you still feel blank, fog rising inside you, great empty spaces like those moors people walk on in British films? Are you better when, as you’re going through the motions—talking, laughing, listening, walking the dog, helping Mum with dinner—at the same time there’s this lost feeling walking beside you, so you can touch it, like a tongue on a tooth?

I reach into the brightness and try to rub some on myself, but I can’t seem to make it stick.

Sometimes I think it would be good to go somewhere new . . . and not have anyone know me.

Stare into a fire for more than a minute and it’s clear we humans are ridiculous for thinking we’re solid. We are built from nothing, collapsible in an instant. We’re elements arranged, empty atoms ricocheting, atoms coming and going. We think we’re these tangible things, but really we’re just ghosts walking, dust waiting. Our insides are made of flickered, fickle light.

I have always had Mum to talk to, after every terrible thing that’s ever happened. Each time, she’s been the one with the dustpan and brush, sweeping up my pieces. I guess this time I broke her?

When in doubt, ignore the problem. It’s worked for centuries. This is how we humans have ended up in such a shit puddle.

You can’t escape your history. It’s like a river that follows you, blood that moves without you thinking. The past turns corners to find you.

“I mean, to love someone who lives outside your body, whose life you can’t control. You can’t hold anything still. You can’t be sure anything will be okay. You can’t stop the sky from falling.”

Life is terrible and beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the best/worst at the exact same time, all possibilities at once.

I walk with these things, but they don’t define me. I live with, and beyond them.

I am so very glad to still be here. Every day, I do my best to see the colors. I take note. I breathe them in.

Talking has saved me, again and again. It is okay—and you absolutely deserve—to ask for help when things are hard. Remember, lovely human, that you matter very much. You are a miracle of molecules: infinite and extraordinary.

Whoever you are, however you identify—whether you are still figuring out your story, or singing it from the rooftops, or somewhere beautifully in between—here you are, here we are together, all of us deserving to live, love, and be loved, in freedom and equality.