Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would.

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”

REGAN reaches for the bottle of pills and says nothing. She wonders how long it will be until she feels something again.

Regan estimated his dick to be average-sized, and while that wasn’t necessarily problematic, the fact that he probably didn’t know what to do with it was. A pity, as he was handsome enough.

pls

Sibling rivalry was nothing new, though Regan didn’t exactly feel the need to disparage her sister. It wasn’t Madeline’s fault she’d been the more pleasing daughter.

Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us.

Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable,

“Something has to kill us,” he agreed.

don’t think there’s anything wrong with a lie.”

Everyone, in Aldo’s experience, could be quantified by the things that mattered to them.

“But if you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art.”

you’ll like it. That was one of her least favorite phrases; it was always unwisely assured. She hated all scenarios preceding the assumption that someone could predict her taste. Either they thought it universal enough that she could be lumped in with masses or they thought (usually incorrectly) that they understood her specific needs, and she wasn’t sure which crime was worse.

“Besides, maybe bees for you are like art for me. Maybe it’ll teach me more about you than it does about bees.”

This has to be a metaphor, Regan thought. “That’s not a metaphor,” Aldo said. “Of course not,” Regan agreed.

!!!!!!!

The opposite of divine right, Regan thought; a godless society of women. A true patriarchal nightmare. The thought inflamed her temporarily with a reverential delight.

“Seems like a question better suited to our inevitable robot overlords,”

“I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”

“Because if you don’t have something to figure out, then you have no reason to keep going?”

Churches were their own kinds of museums—with their devotion to ritual, at least, if not to God—and to exist inside of one was to dwarf oneself with inequity.

He was uncommonly beautiful.

“Oh, interesting,” Marc said, and briefly, Aldo thought about bees. Specifically, drone bees.

Dead.

She took him in sense by sense: he felt certain, smelled permanent, sounded firm.

Chaos for chaos’ sake. Regan’s staple, and what made her such a fucking laugh.

Every time a pill sat in Regan’s palm she suffered some new strangulation; a faint memory of some distant need to force her heart to race. She’d crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but find only pulse after pulse of nothing. Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?

She was feeling something akin to excitement, in fact, which was an astounding but highly welcome alternative to the usual existential dread at the thought of facing her family.

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

Complementary pieces in a perfect, shitty puzzle, where she was the broken one and he was normal. She would always be sick and he would always be fine.

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. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.

“I think,” he said, “that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.”

“Sometimes it’s like I’m there, but not really. Not fully. Like part of me is going to wake up a century later and everything will just be totally unidentifiable,”

“Sometimes,” he began slowly, “doesn’t happiness seem … fake? Like it might be something someone invented. An impossible goal we’ll never reach,” he clarified, “just to keep us all quiet.”

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.

Not everything is about you, what you want, what you feel. That’s what it means to grow up and realize there are other people in the world besides yourself.

i feel like im in one of my own conversations with my mom holy shit

You’re making a mess, you’re flailing around like usual, did you take your pills? Did you hold them in your hands, cradle them between the lines of your palms, and let them remind you how ill you are, how sick, how desperate?

JESUS

She was buzzing a little, almost vibrating with something indefinable. Excitement, maybe. She had, after all, snuck into his room, and perhaps not all elements of youthful rebellion faded with age.

She was remaking herself as a vault and he felt it, the way she drifted away from him, even before she slid her hand from his.

now she felt nothing but loathing for the way she could only hate herself and still place no blame on him.

She should take her pills.

Take your pills, just take them, you’ve done it a million times, it means nothing and nothing will ache if you don’t want it to. This was nothing. This painting was nothing. His approval was nothing. Take your pills.

Are you taking your pills, Charlotte? Of course, Mother, fucking of course I am, and if I weren’t I would lie to you, because you already stole my capacity for truth.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a fire. I used to burn out, now I just burn.

That was enough thinking for one day.

That was all art was, wasn’t it? The blatant exposition of the inside of her head.

For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art,

what is religion except the vague promise of a reward nobody’s ever seen?”

The most distinctive space was the one unseen between his eyes and thoughts, separated by what seemed to Regan to be a distance of miles, eons, light-years.

“Take your pills, then. If that’s what you want.” She spread her fingers over his chest, possessing him. “I don’t want to,” she confessed. “I can’t go back, not anymore.” You don’t just unburn,

Where are we in the cosmos, because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?