The Force That Keeps You From the Floor

You are touching the floor. Except you aren't. There is a gap — invisible, smaller than a single atom — and across that gap, two forces are screaming at each other. The electrons on the outside of your foot and the electrons on the outside of the floor carry the same charge. Same charges repel. They always have. They always will. What you feel as solid ground, as the reassuring push of the world holding you up, is an electromagnetic storm so fast and so small that your nerves report it as touch. You have never felt wood. You have never felt skin. You have never felt anything at all — only the force that keeps two things from ever truly meeting.

And here is the part that should keep you awake: this is not a flaw in your senses. It is not a limitation of human biology. It is a law. Nothing in the universe has ever touched anything else. Every handshake in history, every kiss, every blow that ever broke a bone — all of it was forces talking across a gap so small we don't have a word for how small it is. The universe is almost entirely nothing. And the nothing is holding you up right now.