Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

she would come to recognize that it was less a question of when everything had happened and more a surrendering to when there had been no turning back.

He could spend infinite lifetimes studying the mathematical basis of the universe and the universe would still not make sense.

Marc is the latter, and he loves her the same way she loves art, which Regan considers a pleasing form of irony. Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.

Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to.

It wasn’t as if people typically woke up with perfect resiliency, or that something could be made to vanish without leaving traces in its place.

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.

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.

Something is wrong, she thought, something is right. Something is definitely wrong but the something right is bigger, somehow, closer to truth. Wrong the way truth is when it’s right.

Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.

Are you ready? his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.

thinking only that he doesn’t want her to be sorry, that in fact “sorry” from her tongue should be reserved for only the most capital of offenses, such as disappearing from his life forever

The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before.

Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

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

Afraid that now she was Aldo’s Regan, which meant that Aldo’s Regan could fade into obscurity; that her honesty with him was just another version of a lie.

“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.”

This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.

“I can’t go back,” she whispered to herself, refreshing a curl with a twist around her finger. Okay, her wide eyes said, okay, fine. Then get ready to move forward.

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.

“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?” “It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,”

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

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