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.

And the ratio evens out. Shit to Wonderful. 1 : 1.

They say observation affects reality, that it can pin an electron into place. Until then, the electron is just a possibility, just an idea. Until it’s seen, it might as well not exist.

Why is shouting the word fuck so satisfying? It just is. It. Just. Is.

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.

Mum only says good things about Dad to me. I’m like the opposite of one of those worry dolls. I’m the one you tell only happy thoughts to.

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 an unrelenting urge to lay your head down on the table, wherever you are, whomever you are with.

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.

Have you felt so sad you couldn’t breathe? Has your throat hurt, your chest hurt, your bones? Is this why you have become benumbed?

Here I am, in borrowed bones, in makeshift skin, looking out of eyes that are a construct, breathing with lungs that are only a step—a basic rearrangement—away from leaves. How funny, to have a body when I am not a body? How funny to be inside when I am outside?

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? Here’s the shape of it. Here’s the gap. Here’s the space where something good was. Here’s the want.

It is enough to warm the cockles of your heart. I reach into the brightness and try to rub some on myself, but I can’t seem to make it stick.

“I’ll never leave you. I promise.” And it felt, in that moment, exactly like the truth.

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. ° ° ° ° °

And of course Mum cries here, because when does she get to otherwise? She’s always trying to be Glass-Half-Full everywhere else. And that makes me sad.

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 told Jasper that Mum thinks I’m better. And Jasper has asked: “Do you feel better?” And I’ve said, “Sometimes.” Which is possibly, almost, don’t-look-too-closely-or-it-might-go-away, true.

I don’t know what to say. I feel all the beauty and Jasper’s joy start to pull my feet off the ground. But I don’t want to float today. I want to be here. I lean down and take my shoes and socks off, just to get my toes into something, substance to substance, something real pressing against something real.

When in doubt, ignore the problem. It’s worked for centuries. This is how we humans have ended up in such a shit puddle. Fires, floods, storms, plastic islands in the ocean; how else do you get here if not for shoving your head under dirt until the problem goes away or you die? I mean, and you die?

mountaintop would have crumbled. 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.

“The world is full of strange wonders, darling. Maybe you’re just lucky enough to see them.”

The light has this glow you can’t capture on film. You could try. You wouldn’t get it. Some people call this time the gloaming, but I’d call it “the closest to how it feels to float.” And if someone wanted me to paint the feeling for them, I’d just put their hand on my chest and say, “Here.”

I’m going to float again. I know it will happen. This moment will pass. Another one will come. Hard will come—grief and dark and worry and loss. Again. Again. Sooner. Later.

“It’s too much to ask of a human,” Mum says. “Don’t you think, Biz?” I don’t know what she means, and I know exactly, so I say, “Yeah.” “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 guess it’s whatever it is when you observe it. And a second later, it’s something else. Now it’s something else again. Now it’s something else.

Mum can’t help but laugh because she knows. How it is. To be in this place, in this moment, under this sun, for as long as you can be, for as long as you get. For as long as you can stay to see what might happen next.

“And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”