Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

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.

a child who became a woman who still hadn’t learned, and who would never learn, which gambles were worth it to take.

She thought of Aldo, of time, and how time wasn’t the thing that couldn’t be fixed, it was them—it was humanity in general—because time was what gave shapes to things. They could not see themselves unless they could exist outside themselves; ipso facto, without time passing, they could never really know what they had been.

She’d taken another hit, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, and he’d thought with a sudden, sparkling clarity: Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.