Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

Strangely, she found herself with a grudging sort of respect for him. It took someone painfully ambivalent or blissfully ignorant (or both) to be this out of touch with his students, and either way, she admired it.

“A perfect circle, if you will,” she said, “because it is and it was and it will be, all at once.”

But she agreed with Aldo’s position that not every hypothetical situation was worth pursuing.

How compulsive would you say you are?” her psychiatrist had asked her. Enough to agree to six conversations with a stranger, Regan had thought. “I don’t know,” she’d said, “maybe a little.”)

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

His sweetness was always moderately bitter. His candor was never without some bite. It was what she liked about him, really; his sense of power. Marc Waite was always prettily aloof.

She hated the view of his back. It did something to her, diminishing her to inconsequence, insufficiency, insignificance. She could slip through the cracks in the floor like this, vanishing into nothing for her smallness, and he knew it. An

That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.

“I think,” he said, “that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.” “A whole set of them?” “Oh, almost definitely,” he replied. “I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.”