Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Nature loved balance, especially symmetry, but rarely managed it. How often did nature create perfection? Almost never. Math was different. Math had rules, finite and concrete, but then it just kept going.

Next. People were always thinking about what to do next. Other people were always planning their futures, moving ahead, and only Regan seemed to notice how the whole thing was just moving in circles.

Regan was a spontaneous person who was now tethered to the mundanity of a routine—morning

tomorrow would look like yesterday; would look like three Fridays from now; would look like last month. That he would never be satisfied.

It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us. Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

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,

“We already live far longer than our peak reproductive years. After a certain point we’re just overusing resources.”

any outward show of amusement by Charlotte Regan was either staged or a mutiny, no in between.

This was no good, she thought dully. This wasn’t even close to enough. She had a voracity she could never quite quench, a fear she couldn’t stifle, a sense of dread lingering constantly overhead. She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn’t like needy, so she’d learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces. Flaws, she thought, were just vacancies to be filled.

“Sometimes,” he began slowly, “doesn’t happiness seem… fake? Like it might be something someone invented. An impossible goal we’ll never reach,” he clarified, “just to keep us all quiet.”

One of Aldo’s considerations when it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence.

He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

I’m actually not very good at anything in particular. I’m not really very smart. People don’t know it right away, but eventually they sort it out. Sometimes I think: No wait I’m lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren’t I? So that must mean everyone else is right.

Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not. Maybe the enormity of it all is that she hates the highs and the lows and she knows they’re Bad, that they’re Not Supposed To Happen, but she is not herself without them. She misses herself. She doesn’t really know who she is but she wants to know, she wants to find out, and she can’t do it with pills.

he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”

he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.

“For boys, sex is a part of life, a rite of passage. Boys look at porn when they’re twelve, thirteen! Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they’re taught happily ever after, they’re taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn’t a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because it’s so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they’ll just leave.

Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

“We map things,” he said, “and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”