Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

breathing out and imploring time to slow. Graciously, the night obliged.

Monday layered over Tuesday layered over Wednesday; Thursday was a tracing of the others and so on, with only faint warps around the edges—where he ate something slightly different for breakfast or missed a traffic light on the way home from work—to acknowledge the passing of time. He could travel forward and backward merely by existing within the halo of habit. He lived each day over and over, with only his memory of rising each morning to prove that his existence followed the same rules of motion as everything else.

Wait for him to think, My god, she’s a forger. She’s a thief, she replicates things. Wait for him to say to himself: I am not only the same as Marc, but Marc is the same as the man before him, and the men who are the same as the men before that, and perhaps we are all counterfeit bills, recreated over and over while she cheapens our value, drains us of meaning, spends us like currency and throws us away.

People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.

where she was at any given time wasn’t necessarily where she was, and what she’d been doing was another matter entirely. For example: Was she cooking, or filling a void? Was she painting, or summoning demons? Was she sleeping or was she dreaming, was she transporting through realms, what was it?

one hand curled mournfully around his mouth, his green eyes staring at her painting.

of time, and how time wasn’t the thing that couldn’t be fixed, it was them—it was humanity in general—because time was what gave shapes to things. They could not see themselves unless they could exist outside themselves; ipso facto, without time passing, they could never really know what they had been.

wipes a bead of early summer from his forehead