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. Right?

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.

I wait in bed. For time to pass. For life to stop being bad/worse/worst. For the thoughts to stop sauntering in.

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.

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? Elizabeth? Why are you so ungrateful? Elizabeth? Why is it so hard for you to be happy?

“What’s wrong?” she’s said all weekend. “Nothing,” I’ve said. But we both know I’m lying. So she waits for me to tell her and I wait for her to figure it out.

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.

Sometimes I think it would be good to go somewhere new . . . and not have anyone know me.

I feel so pulled out of my normal self it seems ludicrous I was ever me.

And suddenly I feel so alone it’s like the universe has yawned open and sucked me in, rolling me like a moth in spider silk. I’m cocooned by nothing, and there’s no path out.

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.

He says, “The mind is miraculous.” He squeezes my hand, hard. “You’ve got a fucking miraculous mind, Biz.” I close my eyes. I try to turn off my miraculous mind. It needs to be quiet for one second. A millisecond, I’ll take anything. Please stop so I can rest.

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 nurse looks at her watch, at the date on her watch. And it turns out today is the day Dad died. Ten years ago exactly. Mum comes in. She plops her bag on the chair; she kisses me on the forehead. “Hello, sweetheart,” she says. I say, “Ten years, Mum,” and she bursts into tears. And then all we have, all we can do, is hold each other—as we swim in the water of losing Dad, in the water of missing him, in all that water. We hold each other tightly, tightly, tightly.

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?

“Tiny oceans in our eyes,”