Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Regan was always thinking but she called it feeling, and whatever it was, it was rapid and difficult to follow.

“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,

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.”

Truly, Jennifer, art is for the ill.

he painted TIME! She wanted to shout it, to dial him right then: Monet, he’s obsessed with time, too, he just thinks of it like light, like color. Look at these fucking haystacks,

“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”

He followed a schedule, even if his mind refused to rest within the parameters he prescribed.

No, the thing that makes me different is somewhere else, literally anywhere else, but I can’t enjoy sex without some archaic sociological risk. And if you think about that it’s even worse, because look at the vagina, Aldo. It can have infinite orgasms. It doesn’t require any recovery time. It can come and come and come and what, maybe it gets dry? Lube it up

that humans were inherently flawed, hindered by their insubstantial life expectancies, by mortality itself.

am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.

Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

“No, I’m not. I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t like them, I don’t like what they do to me, and I can’t paint when I’m on them. I’m happier now.”

“Aldo believed I was an artist, so I made it true,” Regan said. “He believed I was an honest person who lied from time to time instead of a liar who sometimes told the truth, so I was. He believed I could love him and so I did, I do.”

What are soulmates, and am I one, or am I just a parasite, a leech, a cancer that spreads and takes hold and takes pleasure in choking us both?

That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.

But the problem with pain existing in the mind is

that it is easy to trick the mind into almost anything—placebos, opinion polls, skewed data; the list of what the brain could be taught to believe was endless—and likewise, the body will do almost anything to feel nothing.

What omnipotence his medication had possessed until it hadn’t; how obediently his mind would quiet until it had fallen out of love with the quiet and fought back.

Bearing the responsibility for what happened when two people fractured and bled was not something she’d ever attempted before, and she felt weakened by the prospect of it now.

“Do you feel human?” “In some interconnected way, like I’m part of a common species? Not often. You?” “Almost never.”

And everything will be as it was, only very slightly different.

The fundamental truth about mental illness, however manageable or grave, is that it is difficult to coexist.