Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

But the body cannot come back, it cannot rebuild itself. It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way.

Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

But the problem with pain existing in the mind is that it is easy to trick the mind into almost anything—placebos, opinion polls, skewed data; the list of what the brain could be taught to believe was endless—and likewise, the body will do almost anything to feel nothing.