How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

At three a.m., I think of hearts. I think of candy hearts and carved-tree hearts and hummingbird hearts. I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don’t get to choose.

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 feel the movement of the stars and I can hear the echo of all the black holes consuming everything—

They are everywhere—the unknown owns us.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It feels like missing. You miss her. You miss him. You miss belonging.

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?

I am the rain. I will be the rain. I will be dead and I will be ash and I will be thrown into water and taken by the sky.

I don’t mind not knowing—the universe is filled with incomprehensible things. We exist inside a multitude of singularities. I accepted this a long time ago.

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

What is it they say on planes: Put on the other person’s oxygen mask before your own, so they don’t die of worry? Yes, that’s exactly what they say.

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

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.

All those glances, the unspoken everythings. I think of all of us, passing each other like turtles, heaving our pasts on our backs.

Don’t we already have too much water inside us? Aren’t we all sinking?)

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 am a ghost of the future walking over the ghosts of the past.

I think about how the “me” I am will end. Any moment really. Any time.

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.

The city unspools, and there’s a kind of heady freedom in realizing I’ve shucked myself off, and I don’t have to miss the me I’m leaving behind.

I didn’t ask the thoughts to come, I say to the walls, the dark, the holes in the air, the holes. They came when I wasn’t looking.

I want to walk off this paper. I want to walk out of this story.

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.

At night I lie awake and watch the clouds make shapes with their hands.

Why did you leave me to this? Why didn’t you tell me it would be like this, so I could go before it hurt this much?

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.”

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.

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.