How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

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? Are you still obsessed with death with deathwithdeathwithdeath? 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?

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 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.”