How It Feels to Float

by Helena Fox

And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface – normal okay regular fine.

At 3 a.m., I think of hearts. I think of candy hearts and carved-tree hearts and hummingbird hearts. I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don’t get to choose.

A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand. Squeeze. It wants what it wants. It can be made of gold, glass, stone. It can stop anytime.

I’m in the ocean I walk beside when I skip school and in the clouds where I imagine myself sometimes.

More than enough of time passing but not enough of the time passed.

And almost every second of every minute I’m with them, I feel like I’m seeing the scene from somewhere else. In front of a screen maybe, watching someone else’s life.

Get yourself a girl who can catch and release.

I often think of a bubble when I think of Dad. He’s sort of see-through, but when he talks about Mum, or me as a baby, his colours fill out. It’s kind of beautiful to watch. If I don’t say anything, he’ll totally float there for hours.

the unknown owns us.

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.

My mind is almost always elsewhere.

I want to tell the ocean how useless I’ve been, but the waves already know.

I am dead in infinite alternate universes. I am mostly and most likely dead. I am dead, now, here.

I didn’t ask for Dad to die, but I am why he was sad.

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.

It feels like an unrelenting urge to lay your head down on the table, wherever you are, whomever you are with.

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?

once upon a time, I had a dad and now I do not, and wouldn’t it be nice if he returned?

Here I am. The sad girl. This is sad. My dad is dead. People are sad when people are dead.

So here I am, sad and grieving because, look, my dad died.

I learned not to ask questions. Just be glad when he came.

I want Dad here,

I want him on the end of my bed, on the arm of the couch, beside the sea, with me.

She: handing over the colourful seeds. Me: pecking dutifully. Look at me. Aren’t I a good little bird?

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?

I am the rain. I will be the rain. I will be dead and I will be ash and I will be thrown into water and taken by the sky.

If you are already the universe, why not just become it, Biz? Why wait? If we are a blip between non-existences why bother staying? Come and be the universe, Biz. Come. Please.

I’m under the tree and I’m in the tree I climbed after Dad died and I’m in the room Dad died in and I’m in the chaos of the moment before he left and I’m in the part of him that decided to leave.

No more obsessing over death, over Dad, over Grace, over the universe and death and Dad and death. No more lying in bed and not moving. No more floating.

I have held Dad’s camera up to the world and clicked.

Bump loves dead things more than he loves anything. Don’t I understand love?

once I had Dad alive and then I had Dad dead,

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?

that was the door I walked through and everything changed—one of the thousands of doors I’ve gone through since Dad died, since Dad got sad, since I was born.

I want now and I want then.

this hope rising, all of it, and at the exact same time—time laid over time— I want what was. ...

Life before Dad died.

(Sometimes I think, What if I leave my body one day and keep going? What if I let go of the earth and nothing brings me back? If I left, would I find Dad?)

All of us can be altered in a blink. Fire reduces you to nothing. Dad’s body in an urn on the bookshelf.

He knows poetry. And it’s amazing. His words soar over the wind and water, out, further, higher, faster.

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

I walk home to my blue house with poetry inside me like a pulse,

Look at me, messaging and walking on beaches and pretending not to miss my dad so much I burn.)

‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’

eating spaghetti and peas.

Ewww

Don’t we already have too much water inside us? Aren’t we all sinking?)

We don’t even have bodies; we’re just two people who needed the sea.

Ah, sunsets! Who made all those colours? I’m a colour, she’s a colour, we’ve made a colour.

Dad. Ohmygod. So this is how I’ll find you.

Sobbing

I am on the hunt for Dad. You can’t do that if you’re sick.