Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.

literally me, in my impersonable youth going through someone's twitter at 3am

He doubted there was any mental space he could occupy that Regan would disrupt.

just kill me why don't you

That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

He took another drag from the blunt as her fingers skated down, running lightly over his cheek and down to his mouth. The dark tips of her nails traveled the shape of his upper lip, curving with it, and in another version of this precise moment, he said, Regan, come closer, let’s see what happens, let’s see how the stars shine on your skin.

He leaned towards her, pausing before they touched, and left room for the reverberations inside her to echo in him. He could feel it again, the buzzing she’d come into the room with vibrating there in that empty space, now occupied by the tremors of possibility. She could fill it with herself, she could shove him away, she could pull him closer. She could pry apart his ribs and leave him there, gutted, doe-eyes wide with, I didn’t think it’d be so wet.

We are somewhere in the depths of time, somewhere people only dare imagine in their dreams. We are floating in dark matter. We are trapped inside a star, which is locked inside a system, which is itself a galaxy we can’t escape and we are lost to each other, to ourselves, and to the inconsequence of space.

She opened his door, everything went wrong, he died in his sleep, it’s over. She opened his door, everything went right, he died in her arms, it’s over.

the writer gets it

I have been everywhere and everything, inside of her, out of body, finally understanding what it’s like to exist outside of my own head.

“I only know that I loved a woman once like her, who saw the world as she does: like a flame she can’t hold between her fingers. I only know that a woman like that isn’t afraid to burn, that she will drag you in with her, and I know she will come out laughing and you will not.

I came to look at art, to marvel at something, and here you are and so I will.

That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.

It isn’t pretty, he wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that’s what you think this is? You think that’s all she’s capable of? You fool, she’s done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn’t, it’s Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.

So be it. This is what it means to live. “I’ll do whatever she wants me to do,”