Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

It was intimate because it was not. It was religious because it was not. It was beautiful because, at the heart of it, it was twisted and soulless and ugly, and therefore it mirrored something masochistic in Regan herself.

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.

As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.

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.

She knows better than to confuse apologies with affection. People are always sorry,

he surprises her, says: I love your brain. She doesn’t know what to deal with first, the use of “love” or the fact that it isn’t what she was expecting, or the idea that anyone can possibly think fondly of her brain when she has put almost no effort into molding it. Her body, that’s easy to love, and her personality, whichever version it is, is specially crafted for every occasion.

Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

Her ship? It’s always sinking, she hates it, it’s either sinking or it’s exploding, either way it never seems to be going anywhere.

Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not.

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

She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.

this is when she knows—god, she knows—that she loves him so deeply and so passionately and so devastatingly that by the time she tells him, the words will inevitably feel empty and small.

I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.