Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”

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.

If she were to paint him, she thought, nobody would even believe her.

“I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”

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.

She took him in sense by sense: he felt certain, smelled permanent, sounded firm.

“There,” she murmured to herself, mussing the cropped waves atop his head and smoothing them back to eye her handiwork. “Now it looks like somebody cares about you,” she said, and her hand stilled, eyes rising up to his in the mirror again.

He wandered to the hall closet, noting the places she’d been. Here. Here. There.

With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection.

You and me, thudded her pulse, You and me, and his answered, Yes, yes, yes,

He let a moment stretch between them. “Are you ready to show me?” Are you ready?, his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.

we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more,

Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

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

“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.

Life was, for Regan, a cycle of arriving and leaving, passing through a revolving door. When she left, which she always did, she left quietly; not even a gust of wind but a little breeze, hardly a disturbance at all.

“I feel like I’ve been going in circles for most of my life, just repeating the same patterns.

The future was uncertain, and the past was a series of cycles that she could only see once she had passed.