Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

to the old you, from the old me

Her own hypothesis was fairly elementary: There was a single moment responsible for every sequence thereafter.

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

It was intimate because it was not. It was religious because it was not. It was beautiful because, at the heart of it, it was twisted and soulless and ugly, and therefore it mirrored something masochistic in Regan herself.

was it because she had been vacant where he was vacant, and therefore both would inevitably seek to be filled?

Nature loved balance, especially symmetry, but rarely managed it.

How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would. It would rain in two weeks, he thought.

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”

She wondered what she was doing out there in all those mirror-shards of lives unlived. Maybe there was a version of her who had woken up at six and gone jogging on the lake path, though she doubted it.

he was an anxious kid, then a depressed teen, and then, for a brief period, a full-blown addict.

but while Masso found cooking to be a religious experience, Aldo considered it something best reserved for special occasions, or homesickness. Though, in his experience, most people considered religion precisely the same way.

disliked the sensation of being asleep. It felt something very close to being dead, which was an uncomplicated and therefore troubling state of being.

When Regan was younger, she had coveted the prospect of a call or a text; it meant, primarily, attention. It meant that she had filled the vacancy of someone else’s thoughts. Then, after a while, she began to understand that there was power in devaluing her worth to others.

elsewhere. If others were forced to wait for her time, she thought, then she would not have to owe so much of herself to them.

Eventually she would marry him, and then everything she was would vanish into his name. She’d attend parties as Mrs. Marcus Waite, and no one would ever have to know a thing about her. She could shrug him on like some kind of cloak of invisibility and vanish entirely from sight.

If she were to chart her parents as a Venn diagram, the only three things in the center would be money, Madeline’s achievements, and what should be done about Regan.

Other people were always planning their futures, moving ahead, and only Regan seemed to notice how the whole thing was just moving in circles.

Regan believes there are two ways to manipulate a man: either to let him pursue you or to let him pursue you in a way that makes him feel he’s the pursuit.

met, Aldo could be patient with the concept of nothing. Emptiness repulsed Regan, filling her with abject terror, but the concept of zero was something that Aldo had come to accept.

away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

He didn’t sound insane, but he didn’t not, either.

He was a mystery, which was interesting. He never quite did or said what she thought he was going to, though that could become its own kind of predictable after a while.

It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

She found it interesting, which was certainly the highest praise she could offer anyone.

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.

This was a life of no expectations, which was the safest kind of life.

“I thought maybe we could be friends,” he said. “Or, if that sounds like too much work, then maybe we can have five more conversations.”

There was something very strange about her, and in order to ease his need to simplify a complex problem, he’d split her up into distinctive areas of study.

in Aldo’s experience, could be quantified by the things that mattered to them. Take his father, for instance. Masso was made up of an abandonment complex, a reflexive protectiveness, a love of great food, and a weighty sense of responsibility. Thus, Masso required habit, reassurance, and a certain degree of shielding from the truth.

“But if you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art.”

“What did you learn about me? Because if the answer is nothing, then it wasn’t a conversation,”

“Some honeybees have stingers incapable of penetrating human skin. So they make all this honey, right?” he said rhetorically, and she nodded. “But obviously people take it from them, and they just keep on making honey anyway.”

though the thought of Regan influencing a child’s development was charming in a way. A slightly troubling, very amusing way.

He doubted there was any mental space he could occupy that Regan would disrupt. In fact, he felt the place he usually reserved for rote mechanization and the occasional wandering thought would be vastly improved by her presence.

Catholicism yearned for flight as much as it championed a healthy sense of fear. The institution was particularly human that way.

He wasn’t just unconventionally handsome, she realized. He was uncommonly beautiful.

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.

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.

Sometimes Aldo thought a fall was precisely what he was waiting for.

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.

He should tell her she looked pretty, he thought, though that was probably an underwhelming word.

parameters, some people are exponential functions, but still largely predictable. Regan”—Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—“isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.”

ease. Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it.

He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

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.

you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs.

Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest.

Those eyes in real life were weapons, or possibly anti-weapons. They had kept her out of prison, he was sure of it. Wide-set and oversized, little picture-boxes of innocence. Frames that made a mockery of everything concealed within.

She leaned forward. He matched her distance again, their foreheads meeting like old friends;

“I don’t think we should see each other for a while,” she confirmed. His chest cracked open, spliced in half, and sealed shut.