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.

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

I bend over a bush and decorate it.

“We’ve seen sharks and drownings and shipwrecks and plastic. Ratio of sharks to drownings to shipwrecks to plastic, 5 : 2 : 1 : 1,000,000,” say the waves at my waist.

she keeps laughing at the things he’s written but not saying them to me and it makes me feel like I’m floating, like I’m one of those balloons people let go, even though that balloon is going to fall in the ocean and kill a turtle.

he’d float with his feet dangling, considering the universe, the ocean rising and falling like it was breathing.

In other words, it was Mum’s first kiss since the last kiss she had with Dad.

I can hear the movement of the secret stars, the ones you never see because it’s day.

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.

I have been in bed so long, barnacles have had to be scraped off my bottom. I gathered moss in my belly button. I grew mushrooms on my tits.

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.

And if I had known she was going to abandon me, I’d have taken a picture of us, walking under the lanterns, our hands laced, and I would have wallpapered it onto my skin for warmth.

I ease the tape off a corner, glacially. Except glaciers are now receding at the rate of knots, so I should probably get to it.

They were so small. Fragile, like Christmas baubles: thin-skinned, bald, tiny glass babies.

I can’t contain this. I want now and I want then. I want this camera, this Sylvia, this boy smiling, this hope rising, all of it, and at the exact same time—time laid over time—I want what was.

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.

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.

By the time Mum rushed in, pulled me away from the fireplace, the doll was a blob on top of the logs. I’d watched her disappear and I understood. Two months before, we’d burned Dad into ash. And even though Mum said over and over that Dad was in heaven, I understood there was no magic space for Dad to go. I had seen how fire worked.

“I thought it was just . . . uncomplicated.” And that might be the first time anyone has seen time spent with me that way.

It’s too hard to catch; the thought flashes, the wind snatches it, it goes.

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

“Come on,” he says, and even though I have to pee, even though I’ve needed to go for ages, I follow him, moth to sun.

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.

We don’t cover our bodies. We don’t even have bodies; we’re just two people who needed the sea.

The hate warms me while I wait—it’s chilly out here.

the sun is stepping out of the ocean like a goddess, shedding cloud clothes and strutting naked into the sky.

All except the lenses in my eyes and my cerebral cortex, which I guess are the lone keepers of the keys to me.

It’s totally not vegan to not contact your mum.”

The moon is a white curl against the paper of the sky.

and their light is my light.

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.

“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.”