Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

He didn’t sound insane, but he didn’t not, either.

Catholicism yearned for flight as much as it championed a healthy sense of fear. The institution was particularly human that way.

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.

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. 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. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.