The Floor That Isn't There

You are not touching the floor. You have never touched anything in your life. The atoms in your feet and the atoms in the ground are holding each other at arm's length — screaming at each other, electromagnetically, to stay apart. What you feel as solid is a war between forces so small they have no colour, no temperature, no shape. Just repulsion. Just two sides refusing to budge. The floor feels hard because the electrons in it are furious at the electrons in you. That's it. That is the whole secret of solid. Every time you've ever pressed your hand to a wall, leaned into a table, sat in a chair — you were never quite there. A gap so thin it makes a human hair look like a canyon was always between you and the world. And yet it held. You didn't fall through the floor the way you fall through air, because air's electrons are too spread apart to push back in time. The floor's electrons are packed tight, shoulder to shoulder, ready. They push back the instant you arrive. They were always going to push back. You have spent your entire life being held up by something that technically never touched you, and this is considered completely normal.