How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand. Squeeze. It wants what it wants. It can be made of gold, glass, stone. It can stop anytime.

And almost every second of every minute I’m with them, I feel like I’m seeing the scene from somewhere else. In front of a screen maybe, watching someone else’s life.

He actually looks a bit like a smudge—like, if it wasn’t for his leg you might pass right by him, like he’s a part of a wall you’ve needed to repaint for years but can never find the time.

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 smile for the first time in approximately six days, or a month, or ever. Something inside me shifts, opens. It makes way for the possibility of something good.

I didn’t ask to be friends with Evie, but I was friends with Evie, even though I was never friends with Evie. I never said, “No, Evie. I can see directly into the molecular arrangement of you. It tells me you are a future bitch, so I won’t be your friend.”

I didn’t ask for Dad to die, but I am why he was sad.

Do you still feel alone in spite of being surrounded by almost eight billion people including twins who come into your room and kiss your face and a mum who brings you warm soy milk when you can’t sleep and a house with walls and a roof?

Why are you so sad and empty when you have a house with walls and a roof and people who love you? Elizabeth? Why are you so ungrateful? Elizabeth? Why is it so hard for you to be happy?

Shouldn’t she be at the pool side, gauging our moods, making sure we don’t pass our tipping points and submerge?

Suddenly, I get it: who I am, what I am, where, and why. I am everywhere. I know everything. I am the universe. I have always been. How funny to think I was anything else? I never want this to end.

Carol, our teacher, is excited in this twitchy way, like perhaps she’s never taught a class before or was a bird in another life.

(They probably all met before the first class and said, “All right. There’s this sad girl coming. Let’s mess with her head.” Then they all tittered behind their hands and chewed their gum and one of the old men made a farting sound with his lips on the palm of his hand and everyone laughed till their dentures fell out.

She said, “It’s okay.” “It’s not,” I said. And of course we meant two different things.

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.

I think of all of us, passing each other like turtles, heaving our pasts on our backs.

I haven’t said how slippery things can seem.

we are happy—if you took a photograph of us, you’d see it is true—and maybe that’s a miracle for the both of us.

He gives them a grin and it’s like Jesus has come down the chimney with a sack of presents.

When in doubt, ignore the problem. It’s worked for centuries.

He’s grinning at me and if I took a photograph of him right now I’m certain light would beam from every opening, maybe even his belly button.

The honk blats into my brain the same time as Jasper shoves me, and it turns out the sky is a trickster—trying to hold me still so a delivery van can mash me flat on a Cootamundra street.

Dad? 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?

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