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.

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.

“Me?” A wave slaps at my chest. “Yes, you, Biz, what the fuck are you doing just scrolling the Internet when the sea is suffocating?”

Look at yourself, Biz. Do you see? pushandshoveandslap How useless/stupid/hopeless you are? Of course the waves should take you. Yes. Of course. They should.

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.

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.

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?

I’m in this echo of a house with only a sleeping dog and creaking walls for company, and once I had Dad alive and then I had Dad dead, and once I had friends and school and I was busy, and now life is beating on without me, everyone bouncing and dancing and talking and kissing and drinking, and all I am is alone.

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.

People should do the world a favor and die out. At least, all the dicks should die out.

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.

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

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.