Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

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.

“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.”

Then she was quiet as only she could be quiet, with every motion impossibly loud.

Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

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.

I’ve changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color.

“They have no religion—which makes sense, really, because what is religion except the vague promise of a reward nobody’s ever seen?”

He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

“Because I love you.” As simple and uncomplicated and wildly unimaginable as that.

Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

To give into something all at once was to lose yourself completely, and therefore to resist was to exchange one fleeting moment of pleasure for a more exquisite, abounding pain.

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.

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?