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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.
It reminded her of a time when people still committed their violence eye to eye, which gave her a paradoxical sense of gratification.
“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”
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.
In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.
“There’s that six again.”
The Atlas Six...
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.
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.)
That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.
Do you have any opposition to octagons?” “Not my favorite of the geometric shapes, but they’re certainly not invalid.”
“I think,” he said, “that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.” “A whole set of them?” “Oh, almost definitely,” he replied. “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.”
Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you’re the kind of person people leave? Maybe it will, because look at his mouth, look at the shape it makes when his eyes are on you. You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying
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It was an implied question: 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?
he only heard it after he felt it, the shutting of the doors and barring of the windows. Somewhere inside her she was triple-checking the locks, swallowing whatever keys remained, tossing them into flames and melting them down to be fashioned as jewelry, as armor, as chains. She was remaking herself as a vault and he felt it, the way she drifted away from him,
Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax;
Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill this fragile little thing I’ve found, this fledgling breath I’ve taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee.
For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice.
He was capable of devoting his thoughts to any number of impossible problems. He was also, as it turned out, a seeker of unavailable things.
Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.
“They have no religion—which makes sense, really, because what is religion except the vague promise of a reward nobody’s ever seen?”
It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye.
He thinks of all the other versions of himself making love to all the other versions of her and resolves to pluck them out of their alternate realities, out of their alternate spaces and times, to place them in this one.
The sense of resignation, it was inescapably tied to The Fight. Before Aldo, 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, for the evasive toil of Love and Relationships,
God is a myth! Time is a trap! Virginity is a construct! Love is a prison!—
Regan was always thinking but she called it feeling,
Promise me that, Aldo. If we fuck this up and it goes badly, then okay fine, you’ll go back in time and make sure we never meet.
:(
He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows,
So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.
“like you want the satisfaction of the end result, but not too quickly, not too easily. If it comes too easily, it’s not worth doing.
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.
Can’t you see how intangibly I exist, and how perilously?
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.
It felt unfair, unjust, that the things that had so easily been shared between them—I’m strange, no I’m strange, okay we’re both strange, nobody understands us except for us—were now hers to bear alone.
It was something new to curate, Regan thought: the possibility that she could haunt him or free him,
