Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

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.

(“And how are your moods?” the doctor had asked. The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking. 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. Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she? “Managed,” she’d said.)

One of Aldo’s considerations when it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence.

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

“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.”

Habits, Aldo had always thought, were the antithesis of linear time. As in, a habitual existence was to live time in circles, like chasing your tail, this time the same as this time the same as that one.

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. He didn’t know it was vacancy until his new life was overfull, bursting, his sense of stability lost to the effort of pacing himself to her.

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

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.

To you, my fellow mortals with your gorgeous little fractures: Your crazy is your magic. Your wildness is what makes you. Resilience is your talent. Burn, but don’t burn out.