Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Having turned a corner from where she’d been, she would come to recognize that it was less a question of when everything had happened and more a surrendering to when there had been no turning back. It was always a matter of time in the end, just as it had been in the beginning.

Aldo considered it something best reserved for special occasions, or homesickness. Though, in his experience, most people considered religion precisely the same way.

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.

It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.

She was gratified he didn’t say 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.

The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being.

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.

Sometimes she was a marvel, brilliant, creative, witty; sometimes merely predictable, spoiled, manic, vain. It was never particularly cruel, but it was always honest.

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.

“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.

We are somewhere in the depths of time, somewhere people only dare imagine in their dreams. We are floating in dark matter. We are trapped inside a star, which is locked inside a system, which is itself a galaxy we can’t escape and we are lost to each other, to ourselves, and to the inconsequence of space.

Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.

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.

and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me. He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.

Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

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

Regan was always thinking but she called it feeling, and whatever it was, it was rapid and difficult to follow.

Ah, Masso said, okay, I see what she is. What does that mean, Dad, what is she? She’s your … you know, your provocateur, she’s your disturbance.

He knows the angle to hold her hips. He knows how deeply he can fill her, how hard before it hurts.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. 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.”

He’d never thought of logistics, like what to do with a day, until her.

This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.

She didn’t feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself.

Like she and eternity and omnipotence were the same, or like omniscience could be equated to the sound of his ragged breath in her ear. She wanted him to mess her up, deplete her, to deliver her to something lesser, something baser. Something less inclined to rational thought, and instead diminished only to sensations.

Was that growth? Of course it was growth, she was uncontainable now.

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.

“sometimes I think it’s so pointless that we’ll never know anything. We’ll never test anything because we can’t, it’s impossible to be around long enough.”

He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

“like you want the satisfaction of the end result, but not too quickly, not too easily. If it comes too easily, it’s not worth doing. You know how good it’ll feel to figure it out, but you don’t want it yet so you’re pushing it away. It’s like that,”

Can you really understand someone without knowing what brings them pleasure?

Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they’re taught happily ever after, they’re taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn’t a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because it’s so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they’ll just leave.

Because really, how the fuck is my vagina different from any other woman’s? No, the thing that makes me different is somewhere else, literally anywhere else, but I can’t enjoy sex without some archaic sociological risk.

The Fight was meant to be red as well, but the more she thought about it, the more it became clear that they—neither of them—truly knew what it was to fight like that for anything. They could have only fought in blue, in melancholy tones of it, because relationships, for them, were blue.

The effort of asking herself felt like the loneliest thing of all, and the silence that followed was deafening.

Your crazy is your magic.