The Floor That Isn't There

You are not touching your chair. You have never touched anything in your life. Not the floor, not a hand you held, not a single surface you have pressed your palm against. The electrons on the outside of your skin and the electrons on the outside of everything else carry the same charge, and identical charges repel — permanently, absolutely, without exception. There is no moment at which they give way. So what you call 'touch' is a war you are always losing, held perfectly at a draw: your electrons pushing outward, the world pushing back, and a gap between them so small it would take a million of them stacked to reach the width of a human hair, and yet — never closed. Never once closed. What you feel when you press your hand to a table is not contact. It is resistance. Electromagnetic force wearing the costume of solidity. The chair is holding you up right now not because it is solid but because its electrons refuse to share space with yours. The strange part — the part that should bother you more than it does — is that this means every sensation you have ever had of the physical world has been a message carried across a gap that was never, not even once, bridged. You have only ever felt the pushing-back. The thing itself? Untouched. Untouchable. Still there, an arm's length away, in every direction, forever.