Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

men looked at the world, took in all its beauty, and still only saw it flat.

The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her single imperfection;

and he loves her the same way she loves art, which Regan considers a pleasing form of irony. Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.

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.

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.

Everyone sees through you and on the other side of you is the way life looks without you, and inevitably they will run straight for it with relief.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye.

This moment will always taste of filth, it will smell of dust, until you cleanse your palate.

She thinks: I hate that I didn’t get on that train, I hate that I watched him go and fade to nothing, and at first she thinks she loves Rinaldo Damiani the same way she loved the boy on the train. As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”