How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

People scratch hearts into benches, draw them onto fogged windows, tattoo them on their skin. Believe the story they tell themselves: that hearts are somehow bigger than muscle, that we are something more than an accidental arrangement of molecules, that we are pulled by a force greater than gravity, that love is anything more than a mess of nerve and impulse—

I am dead in infinite alternate universes. I am mostly and most likely dead. I am dead, now, here. All doors opening, all doors closed.

I am going to lie here for the entire day. I will sleep and get up only to pee and then crawl back inside my cave. I will slow down my breathing until it is barely perceptible. I will spend autumn and winter here and come out with the spring flowers.

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.

And I say, “Oh, yes. I will. Thanks!” so brightly the corona of my immense positivity almost burns us both to a crisp.

She can’t seem to focus on us—her eyes slide over our bodies like we are made of mercury. That, or her eyes are made of mercury. Either way, something is slipping.

I don’t want to move forward. I don’t want to do digital photography. Those photos won’t talk to me. All I want is to be back in the darkroom, to crawl inside and stay. I want the red hush, the clean smell of chemicals. I want to lie inside the black-and-white mess of history. I want to not come out until I know everything.

The air feels sun-crusted. I’m in my thrift shop overalls and three-dollar flip-flops, flowers in hand, because I haven’t seen Sylvia in weeks and I feel bad. Flowers fix everything, right?

Maybe I am smaller. I am hunched, I think, trying to shrink into the fireplace, maybe hide in one of those snow globes of Sylvia’s. I am a Tasmanian devil, I am a fern, I am the water in the globe.

Truth and truth split in two and walk side by side.

All truth does is float, travel in these impossible, unpredictable zigs and zags, out to space and back. You can’t find truth if you haven’t captured it. You can’t be sure, if you don’t take a photograph and hold what happened in your hand.

I turned my head and watched the ocean appear in snatches, moon-glinted and metallic.

He’s a mystery and not a mystery, like the two sides of a coin or a heart or the sea.

The sand feels like a touch. It feels like my mother’s hand on my skin, cool against warm. It feels like talking at night. It feels like stories and it feels like being seen.

I tell Bridgit that Jasper and I rode home as dusk rose and made the light purple and it felt like floating but also not like floating, because between my arms was Jasper’s body, solid, and under me was the bike, and the white lines on the road were like dashes, pulling us forward.

It’s kind of perfect, this lasagna. And as I cut into it, it feels symbolic, like all those books we analyzed in school—the last meal, the knife cutting into the perfect top, me serving up my scrambled insides while holding my secret close. I’m a metaphor, ladling carrots and white sauce and lentils onto mismatched plates and handing them over to my unsuspecting family.

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

My body is not even slightly the same body I had when I was born. We alter completely, constantly—our cells die and are replaced, every day, week, decade—our organs, our skin, our bones. Which means the Biz who popped out seventeen years ago ceased to exist hundreds of times since birth. All except the lenses in my eyes and my cerebral cortex, which I guess are the lone keepers of the keys to me.

And suddenly I feel so alone it’s like the universe has yawned open and sucked me in, rolling me like a moth in spider silk. I’m cocooned by nothing, and there’s no path out.

I try to explain, but all that comes out are speech bubbles, like in cartoons. My bubbles are empty. It is pitiful. I want to walk off this paper. I want to walk out of this story.

Life is impossible, chaotic. It’s a maze of sorrow and sunlight; it can’t be mapped.

How will we ever make it out of this labyrinth?

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.