Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

She wondered what she was doing out there in all those mirror-shards of lives unlived.

The possibilities were fascinatingly mundane and yet, somehow, perfectly endless, which was close enough to elation itself.

Of course, if she wanted mediocre dick, that was deplorably easy to find without picking this mediocre dick.

Hehe

Everything leading to everything else, following the same patterns if you happened to look closely

Now, Regan is so very talented at being completely unreliable that people have started to call it a weakness. She takes some pride in their misconceptions; it means people can always be fooled.

That in two weeks, predictably unpredictable, it might rain, and therefore in changing, everything would remain the same.

Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

The first month on this particular cocktail of medications had made her so sick she’d dropped an effortless ten pounds, the feeling of hunger gradually becoming preferable to the putrid sense of rotting from the inside out.

Too relatable

“I think theoretically the mathematical factor would be compiling the sum of your parts.”

“Most of art is a loose interpretation.”

“Only if you’re looking for the truth in an object,” she said. “But if you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art.”

“A perfect circle, if you will,” she said, “because it is and it was and it will be, all at once.”

“I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”

“Because if you don’t have something to figure out, then you have no reason to keep going?”

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.

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.

Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?

She was constantly in the midst of an underpainting, imagining things as they could be before steadily making them true.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn’t like needy, so she’d learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces.

that l’appel du vide, the call of the void.

“I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.”

“Sometimes it’s like I’m there, but not really. Not fully. Like part of me is going to wake up a century later and everything will just be totally unidentifiable,”

“I want to see your art.” She opened her mouth, then hesitated. “That’s a key,” he noted, and she rolled her eyes. “I just don’t have any,” she said. “I haven’t done anything in ages. Years.” “Not even a sketch?” “Not even a sketch,” she said, shaking her head. “Haven’t had time.” A lie.

My life and a convsrsation ive had so many times

“doesn’t happiness seem … fake? Like it might be something someone invented. An impossible goal we’ll never reach,” he clarified, “just to keep us all quiet.” “Almost certainly,” she agreed.

Is your life a dream or a chart?

You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art.

If you could open only one part of me for your consumption, for your delectation, for the whims of your carnivorous mind, which part would you wish to see?

we are lost to each other, to ourselves, and to the inconsequence of space.

Her art. That was what he wanted.

This wasn’t a painting made to satisfy the heart, but rather to buy the groceries.

Then, for the first time in three years, four months, and fifteen days, Charlotte Regan began to paint.

“Yes, I know, and I told you, something has changed,” Regan confirmed, rising to her feet. “I started painting again.”

That was all art was, wasn’t it? The blatant exposition of the inside of her head.

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. For the abandonment of fear the reward

would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art,

because what is religion except the vague promise of a reward nobody’s ever seen?”

“I don’t mind being trapped,” she murmured, the little strokes of her pencil like caresses to the page. “Sometimes I like it. Easier. Nothing to think about.”

She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he’d secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.

“I feel a bit like … I don’t know. Like I did, or maybe I still do, but not the same. The roof’s been patched but the shutters are still broken.” “And before?” “Water got in everywhere. No floods, just a steady drip somewhere impossible to locate. Always about three degrees colder than I’d like to be.” “Ah. What changed?” “I’m painting now.” I can paint now, again. “I don’t want to stop. I don’t even want to fix the shutters, I just want to flood the damn house.” She cleared her throat. “No, I’m lying. I don’t want a flood, but I don’t even want the house.” A pause. “I want to light the house on fire and walk away while it burns.”

because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?

It has required more permission to kiss her lips, to share her breath, than to slide inside her pussy, to occupy her cunt.

love was concession. Love was a withering Yes, dear, and the sensation of Don’t fight, Be careful of the eggshells, You are not at home here and can easily be sent away. She had thought love meant being Reasonable, a proper noun for a proper effort,

love your brain.

Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing? Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? 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?

Can you love me when i dont love me

She’s tired of people telling her she’s free to leave, she hates it.

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