Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I don’t think we’re really capable of loving the things our parents love.

The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being.

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.

“Sometimes it’s like I’m there, but not really. Not fully. Like part of me is going to wake up a century later and everything will just be totally unidentifiable,”

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

You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”

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.

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

Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.

An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.