How It Feels To Float

“I can feel the tightness of her skin when she saw the train, and how sweat sprang up a moment before the train hit—

step

and how our pupils widened

step

and turned my eyes to black.”

At the beginning of the novel, Biz is obsessed with the death of a woman who died after being hit by a subway train while crossing the tracks. On her way to school, Biz projects herself into the woman’s mind. The pronouns change from “her” to “our” to “my,” suggesting that in her perception Biz becomes the woman who was killed.

“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.”

Biz searches for metaphors to explain her feeling that she represents the observer’s paradox, a concept in the sciences whereby the presence of an observer changes the outcome of the subject being observed. She also references the uncertainty principle, which states that one cannot know both the speed and position of an electron (or other particle) at the same time. The metaphors communicate that for Biz, part of her experience is always unknowable, both to herself and others.

“Things change in an instant—one minute a mountain, solid and immoveable. The next, the land drops out. Trees collapse and tumble. The landscape slides into a mess of scars.”

Biz cannot accept surprises—she links them to the moment she learned about her father’s death. She struggles to adjust to a world in which things change suddenly. The earthquake metaphor shifts in the last line with the reference to scars, implying the presence of emotional scars from traumas Biz experienced in the past.

“His face is like a door, closing. I hold my hand out to him, but just as I am about to touch, he fades out. Leaving only the idea of him.”

This description of her father’s fading ghost suggests his unreliability. She uses the projection of the father she misses to shield her from engaging with the real world, but his protection is not real. Ultimately, she must let go of him if she is to live a full and healthy life.

“Have you felt so sad you couldn’t breathe? Has your throat hurt, your chest hurt, your bones? Is this why you have become benumbed? Are you still obsessed with death with deathwithdeathwithdeath?”

Biz here ties to put into words the physical pain of her depression, how she still feels grief acutely even after 10 years. The closing string of words not only pays homage to “Buffalo Bill’s,” which Jasper shares with Biz, but also reveals Biz’s panic as she thinks about death.

“The photos are talking to me, and I don’t know why. I don’t mind not knowing—the universe is filled with incomprehensible things.”

When the photographs she takes begin to talk to her, Biz accepts it without question. Rather than being a sign of psychological pathology, the talking photographs show Biz’s efforts to connect with the world through the vehicle of her photos. It marks the beginning of her recovery.

“I broke him.”

A significant element of Biz’s mental health recovery centers on her coming to terms with the emotional and psychological struggles of her father. Breaking implies a struggle to repair and reveals her father’s vulnerable mindset. It is Jasper who will tell Biz later in the novel that a broken mind has the capacity to recover.

“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?”

Sylvia is key to Biz’s return to mental health. Here, Biz discovers that when she is with Sylvia, she feels both good and bad emotions. For Biz, who embraces not feeling as her way to cope with real-time problems, this moment is a tipping point. Biz allows herself to feel even though the experience is uncomfortable.

“We have no proof, so we can’t pin it. 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, take a photograph and hold it in your hand.”

Biz wrestles with how to confirm she is actually alive. Like an electron bouncing around in empty space, Biz feels the reality of her existence as tenuous and uncertain. Verification that she is alive can only come when she is seen and validated by another. In her case, that verification will come from Jasper, Bridgit, and Sylvia.

“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…empty atoms ricocheting.”

Central to Biz’s obsession with her father’s death is her memory of his cremation. Here, she uses a physics analogy again to convey her feeling of uncertainty and emptiness.

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

Biz feels an instant affinity for Jasper and recognizes him in a way she cannot yet articulate. His mysterious qualities intrigue Biz, but getting to know him as a real person is even more fulfilling than seeing him as a rebel or outsider.

“I’m not alone; my feet walk over the ghosts of Dad’s footprints. I am a ghost of the future walking over the ghosts of the past. I step on each crack and the cracks open wide, wider.”

As Biz heads to Temora and her emotional showdown with her past, she depicts herself as more dead than alive. Her quest to find her father becomes a quest to save herself: She begins to understand she cannot rely on the help of her father’s ghost and needs to rid herself of his presence/absence.

“I think about how the sun is right. How in a blink, I’ll stop being Biz and become something other. I think about how the ‘me’ I am will end. Any moment really. Any time.”

Prompted by glimpsing the ocean from the train on her way to Temora, Biz reveals awareness of mortality. Still locked into the past, she obsesses about the moment of her own death and how death can come without warning, recalling the trauma of finding her father dead.

“And in that instant, the indisputable fact that Jasper is gay stares back at me. Huh. How did I not catch that? How did the photos not tell me?”

The revelation that Jasper is gay gives Biz two important insights. First, she sees the pain that Jasper has endured from the antigay bias of those around him. Second, it shows the talking photos to be projections of her own consciousness: They could not tell her about Jasper’s sexuality because she didn’t know this detail about him.

“Heard he got twisted in his head like his dad, couldn’t handle farm work, poor precious…his cousins said he was a fuckin’ pussy.”

The visit to her father’s boyhood sheep farm reveals to Biz the emotional struggles of her father. The family that remains at the farm saw Stephen as lacking and too weak to fulfill his responsibilities. They have this opinion about Biz’s grandfather as well. Not having any mental health support in their family or community likely made it more difficult for Biz’s father and grandfather to cope with the difficulties they faced.

“And suddenly I feel so alone it’s like the universe has yawned open and sucked me in, rolling me like a moth in spider silk. I’m cocooned by nothing, and there’s no path out.”

Biz begins her journey into what will prove to be her psychological breakdown in Temora by feeling alone and trapped. On the verge of learning about her father, and nearing her own epiphany about who she is, she feels both isolated and threatened. She knows she will not be able to float about this experience, and that frightens her.

“Dad is like a jigsaw puzzle, but not finished.”

To fully live her own life, Biz must relinquish her need to understand her father. She comes to accept that life will not allow itself to be pinned down, that truth remain incomplete. As Sylvia and Jasper both show her, life does not need to be perfect to be well lived.

“I am in a bed in a room in a pub and all I can hear is Dad. All I can see is water, a man in water, a boy weeping and falling, rust and bleat and hit and blood.”

Just moments before she goes loses consciousness in the Walla Wall Hospital, Biz tries to locate herself in a real time and place, but traumatic thoughts triggered by her day at her family’s farm keep intruding, and she has a PTSD flashback to the scene she imagines of her grandfather’s death merged with her own memory of finding her drowned father.

“Dad?” [repeated 245 times]

These two unsettling pages capture in words what Biz experiences as she struggles to process the traumatic memories of her father’s death. The question mark suggests that Biz is calling for her father as if she were trying to wake him up.

“The mind is miraculous.”

Jasper offers Biz the hope she needs to hear. She believes her mind is broken, destroyed by the trauma of her father’s death and her grief over his absence. Jasper assures her the mind can bounce back from trauma, with help, guidance, and patience.

“When I open [my eyes], Jasper’s gone. Two hours later, I can still see the echo of his body, standing there.”

Unlike the vision of her father, which connected her with traumatic memories, this afterimage of Jasper signals she has begun her recovery. She misses her friend. That love is real and therapeutic.

“It’s hard to see him; he’s fading out. Biz, he says, I love you.”

To begin her recovery, Biz must first say goodbye to her father’s lingering presence. Her psychiatrist, Max, later will tell her there will be moments when she still misses her father; this is normal and will always be a part of her emotional profile.

“‘I truly believe you’ll be able to bring yourself back when you need to.’ I’ll learn to come home, is what he means, learn to pin myself, here and here.”

Biz’s psychiatrist assures Biz that once she is recovered, she will never entirely lose her urge to disassociate. The difference is that she will be able to locate herself in the real world and within her conscious mind without getting swept by the dissociation.