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. It would rain in two weeks, he thought.

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

He found linear functions banal. They were mostly used to simplify things to a base level of understanding, though few things on earth were ever so straightforward. The world, after all, was naturally entropic.

“Jackson Pollock was highly influenced by Navajo sand painting,” Regan said, her own gaze still affixed to the painting. “With sand,” she explained, “the process is just as important as the finished product; in fact, more so. Sand can blow away at any moment. It can disappear in a matter of hours, minutes, seconds, so the process is about the moment of catharsis. The reverence is in making art—in being part of its creation, but then leaving it open to destruction. What Native Americans did with sand, Jackson Pollock did with paint, which is perhaps an empty rendition of it. In fact, he never openly admitted to adopting their techniques—which makes sense, as it’s far closer to appropriation than it is to an homage. But could you do it?”

Marc is the latter, 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.

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.

She hungered for them, the unremarkable crumbs of him.