How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

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.

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?

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 re-arrangement—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?

Just put one word in front of the other, Biz; that’s all you have to do.

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 is impossible, chaotic. It’s a maze of sorrow and sunlight; it can’t be mapped.