How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

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.

“The world is full of strange wonders, darling. Maybe you’re just lucky enough to see them.”

“It’s too much to ask of a human,” Mum says. “Don’t you think, Biz?” I don’t know what she means, and I know exactly, so I say, “Yeah.” “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.”

Life is terrible and beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the best/worst at the exact same time, all possibilities at once. I guess it’s whatever it is when you observe it. And a second later, it’s something else. Now it’s something else again. Now it’s something else.