Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Regan”—Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—“isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.”

He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

I know you’re not stupid. That’s the worst part, Charlotte, I know how smart you are. I know what you could be, but you waste it, don’t you?

I know you can hear me. I know you can feel me, feel my disappointment in you, feel it all unfurling in your bones while you touch the blessed shape of his irreverent mouth and wonder if this voice in your head is crueler for being yours or mine.

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?

Try to hide it, you can’t, he’ll see through you. Everyone sees through you. 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.

Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you’re the kind of person people leave?

You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss.

Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest.

See, he wants me, I am valuable. See, I had a genius between my legs and held him inside me and swallowed him up, and then I made his brilliance mine.

You wanted more from me than I am even worth.

Art was emotional truth and she had none of that,

Regan’s flaws were where Helen and Regan had always privately agreed, so what was more important was where they disagreed.

This painting is good, this is an excellent painting, and in response, Regan had thought: Then I will be like that painting.

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.

“You sound,” he began, and then stopped. “Good,” he decided. The word he’d meant was bright, perhaps even blinding, but it didn’t make sense, and she laughed again.

“I don’t mind being trapped,” she murmured, the little strokes of her pencil like caresses to the page. “Sometimes I like it. Easier. Nothing to think about.”

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

“You can’t fix me,” she whispered to him, her mouth tracing his neck. Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks?

Are you ready? his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.

Just in case. She’s elusive, impulsive, she wanted him yesterday and he was “Oh, good” today, but will he be something less tomorrow?

The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before.

With others, with Marc, it was always Regan, please be reasonable, Regan, I don’t want to do this right now, I’m tired. Regan, are you being difficult because you’re bored? And for her, it was always Fine, fine, I’m sorry. Maybe not the I’m sorry part because she was almost never sorry, but the giving up was always there.

Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

She should be irritated or tired, the way people always are with her, but she isn’t. Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

I love your brain.

Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing?

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

she wants, as she always wants, to be smothered by it, to drown in it, for it to be so vast and devouring it swallows her whole—

but she has felt that way about sex before, about men and boys before. She has already lost herself many times, many ways, so she wants to do it again and thinks it will be familiar.

but this, I love your brain, is more.

she can leave any time if she wants to, so long as she comes back.

she thinks part of it was about taking hold of a sinking ship and steering it somewhere, anywhere. Even the prospect of a crash was better than floating aimlessly.

Her ship? It’s always sinking, she hates it, it’s either sinking or it’s exploding, either way it never seems to be going anywhere.

Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not.

Of course he signed up for it, it’s what he wants. Why should someone else get her highs and lows? He wants them all, selfishly, possessively. He wants to have them,

Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.

She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.

“Yes! But look at him.” Her smile was bright, teasing. “I can’t help it, I have to put him on paper, just to make sure he’s really real.”

But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”

You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”

She thought of the last time she’d been sitting like this on the bathroom sink. She had thought: I wonder if I will ever feel anything again, and look at her now—now she was feeling everything.

If she were any less impulsive, she wouldn’t be with me and I would have never known what she was, or how it felt to hold her. I would never have known what it was to matter for once; for the first time, and for the only time that I have ever known.

So was your mother, and Regan is restless like her. I can see it in the way she moves, the way she looks at you, it’s very familiar.”

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.

Regan didn’t want to die, obviously—nothing that emergent. She just wanted something reasonably compelling; something that would make him think about how precious time was, how every moment of it should be spent at her side, the two of them together.

She wanted to cry, needed compulsively to suffer. Jesus, she thought, you really have a fucking problem, and so she left all her madness out of her phone calls

I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don’t know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I’m afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that? No,

You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you

“No, I meant—I was just trying to keep you there, prolong it in my head. I guess I didn’t know I was smiling.”