The Force With No Name You Know

Right now, your body is not touching the chair beneath you. Not in any way that would satisfy a physicist. The electrons on the surface of your skin and the electrons on the surface of everything you have ever picked up, kissed, or buried — they never met. They got close enough that the force between them screamed, and your brain called that feeling 'contact.' You have been misreading this signal your entire life.

The force doing the screaming has a name — electromagnetism — but the name disguises how strange it is. It reaches across empty space with no hands, no wire, no touching of any kind. It is what makes the floor hold you up. It is what lets you feel a raindrop. It is what stops you, right now, from falling through your seat, through the ground, through the planet, and out the other side into the dark.

Here is the part that is hard to unknow: the sensation you call 'solid' is really 'repelled.' Every handshake in history was two invisible shields pressing together. Every hug. Every time anyone held anyone in the dark and felt less alone.

The atoms inside you are almost entirely empty space. If you collapsed all the actual matter in the human body — no gaps, pure nucleus, pure particle — you would fit every human who has ever lived into a sugar cube.

Something is keeping you from collapsing right now. You cannot see it or name it in your own language. But you can feel it. You always could.