The Invisible Wall

You are sitting on something solid right now. You are certain of it — you can feel the weight of your own body pressing down, the resistance pushing back. Except that isn't what's happening. Not even close. The atoms in your body and the atoms in whatever you're sitting on have never made contact. They never will. What you feel as solid, as real, as the most obvious fact in your life, is a war between invisible forces — a screaming electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons in your skin and the electrons in everything else, holding you a tiny, impossible distance above the surface of the world at all times. You have been floating your entire life and called it standing. The floor is not holding you up. It is refusing to let you in. Every step you have ever taken, every hand you have ever held, every object you have ever gripped — none of it was touch. It was repulsion, so fast and so fierce it felt like contact. And here is the part that gets worse: the force doing this is the same force that lights a bulb, powers a storm, runs through every nerve in your body right now carrying the thought you are having about this sentence.