The Gap

Put your hand flat on the nearest surface. Feel the pressure. That sensation — solid, certain, real — is a lie your nerves tell your brain because the truth is too strange to be useful. Your skin is not touching anything. Not the table, not the chair, not the floor beneath your feet. Between the outermost electrons of your atoms and the outermost electrons of everything else, there is a gap. An invisible wall of electromagnetic force, ancient and absolute, that has never once in the history of the universe allowed two pieces of matter to actually meet. You have never touched your mother's hand. You have never touched the ground. The feeling of solidity — the knock of knuckle on wood, the weight of a body in a chair — is the pressure of that invisible wall pushing back. You are not sitting on anything. You are hovering, perpetually, a fraction of a nanometre above the world, held up by a force that has no interest in you at all. And here is the part that quietly undoes everything: the atoms inside your own body have the same relationship with each other. You are not a solid thing. You are a pattern of distances, a set of agreements between particles that have never once, not for a single instant, been in contact. The thing you call yourself has never been touched — from the inside or the out.