Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now.

You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love.

Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice.

He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

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 want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.

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

She’d given him arrows and he’d shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds.

the archer vibes </3

It’s you and me alone in the ether and you don’t even know it, you don’t even care, but still you are tied to this, and to me, and so be it, really. So be it. This is what it means to live.