Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye.

He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her.

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

She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.

“I want you to expect—no, I want you to demand,” she amended. “I want you to demand things from me, to tell me to make this work, to force me if you have to. I want you to bet on me, Aldo. I want you to make investments, I want your future.” The last part slipped out. “I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.”

His bed was so small, the room itself so small, but their needs were small, too, just each other.

This was vastness—and was it him? Was it her? Was it them? Maybe it was all of it, maybe it was everything, maybe he and she were a little speck of everything when they were touching like this, bound to tiny particles in the air. To things that science had yet to find or name or see.

woman like that isn’t afraid to burn, that she will drag you in with her, and I know she will come out laughing and you will not.

If I am still here, Dad, then please. Let it have been for something.

this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

He’d push and he’d flee and she, like a half-starved junkie, would only crave him all the more.

You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you in gratitude and you will always be kind, you’re just made that way. You’ll let me do it but eventually I will make you unhappy, and then it will be on me to leave, because you are much too good to give me the ending we both know I deserve.

“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?” “It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something,

“ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.”

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

He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

“Because I love you.” As simple and uncomplicated and wildly unimaginable as that.

They had unhurried sex in the bed, which had once been his but was now theirs;

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?

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.

People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.

She, like his thoughts, had drained him, and the pain of knowing it festered in her chest.

She stared at him in silence. She felt the floorboards giving way beneath her like sand, some tide in the distance turning.

Life was, for Regan, a cycle of arriving and leaving, passing through a revolving door. When she left, which she always did, she left quietly; not even a gust of wind but a little breeze, hardly a disturbance at all.

when he’s there, I feel more . . . like me, I guess. Like I finally have something to be proud of. I’m in love with someone I think highly of,

Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are.”

Alone with You in the Ether, it said, followed by Oils and acrylics. Below, in smaller letters: C. Regan.

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?

you and me alone in the ether and you don’t even know it, you don’t even care, but still you are tied to this, and to me, and so be it, really. So be it. This is what it means to live.

whatever they are, it’s irreversible. She is this version of herself because of him, and vice versa.

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

This is not a book about how pills are bad, but about finding the acceptance we need to feel both well and alive.

Your crazy is your magic. Your wildness is what makes you. Resilience is your talent. Burn, but don’t burn out.