How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

I can feel my skin frying. I can feel cancer pooling in my freckles. I can feel the road tar melting under my feet as I scurry across the road.

I can feel my skin frying. I can feel cancer pooling in my freckles. I can feel the road tar melting under my feet as I scurry across the road.

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.

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.

All I have is the look on her face, as she said I was the reason Dad turned sad. It printed itself onto me, in the dark as she spoke.

And it’s so clear how far I have fallen. How far I am from where the stars are.

I want to know what it’s like to watch and not be seen, because I think I already know, but is it different for him?

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?

Your face was like a book I wanted to keep reading. You were sunshine, the whole way through.

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. How funny, to have a body when I am not a body? How funny to be inside when I am outside?

Am I better? 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.

Who invented getting older? I am ancient. Fossilized. Wizened. I can see myself aging before my eyes. Old, older, oldest. I see myself at a hundred: gray haired, rheumy eyed, etched with wrinkles.

We go up the path, one ancient, twittering bird followed by a galumphing albatross—my gut panging, filled to nearly bursting with love and worry, filled with—I’m surprised to find—feeling. What am I supposed to do with it all?

It’s good to settle her, even though I’m only a little settled myself. What is it they say on planes: Put on the other person’s oxygen mask before your own, so they don’t die of worry? Yes, that’s exactly what they say.

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.

It’s like being in a conch shell. And I say that, “It’s like being in a conch shell,” before I run it through my brain to see if it makes sense enough to say.

I’d have to try and explain. Grace, all I know is, I want to sit beside Jasper in front of a fire. How do you put that feeling into words? It’s not like that, Grace. What is it like, then? I don’t know. If I could pin the feeling down I’d tell you.

What do you miss, Jasper? How much do you miss it and in what increments? How large are your lost puzzle pieces? Do you want to find them?

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

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

(I’m a normal girl, Jasper! Really. Look at me, messaging and walking on beaches and pretending not to miss my dad so much I burn.)

“Gold star, Elizabeth! You win—you’re well.” She isn’t wrong. I totally am. I am on the hunt for Dad. You can’t do that if you’re sick.

I turn my head. I watch the bush flick past. I think of being a tree and I think of roots. I think of papery bark. I think of leaves. I think of being a leaf and how uncomplicated that would be.

I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say, “Oh my God,” and I want to reverse time. But it’s too late because time only ever goes forward. Time is an arsehole that way. You can’t undo anything, ever.

(Can I promise that? I don’t know what’s going to happen, Mum. Life is unpredictable—don’t you know we’re living in a chaotic system? Don’t you know you can’t pin anything down?)

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.

“Life does kind of suck,” I say. And it’s true. Life is impossible, chaotic. It’s a maze of sorrow and sunlight; it can’t be mapped.

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.

And when Jasper and I hug, hard, and he spins me and doesn’t let go, the twins leap and scream and Mum can’t help but laugh because she knows. How it is. To be in this place, in this moment, under this sun, for as long as you can be, for as long as you get. For as long as you can stay to see what might happen next.

“And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”