Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What’s that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything. Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.

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. He smiled at her like: Isn’t it great? Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

“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.”

Why does she turn her face away from her lover? Aldo had asked. Regan thought it was to show the woman’s expression, to capture her emotion by the blissful contortion of her face, but Aldo thought otherwise. He thought: To give into something all at once was to lose yourself completely, and therefore to resist was to exchange one fleeting moment of pleasure for a more exquisite, abounding pain.

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.

Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

“Oh, this is pretty,” remarked someone beside him, pointing to Regan’s work, and Aldo turned his head, suddenly irritated. It isn’t pretty, he wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of space-time you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that’s what you think this is? You think that’s all she’s capable of? You fool, she’s done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn’t, it’s Truth. She told The Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.