Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

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.

Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.

Suddenly the room seemed less quiet, buzzing with disturbance, and she felt her mood adjust to the new frequency, deciding to opt for something else.

Regan suspected that Marc liked her a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures.

He felt confident that there would be a moment when all the disjointed parts that made Charlotte Regan so incomprehensible to him would form a recognizable shape, and then he would understand the basis of the problem.

All the energy he’d expended on whatever problem he’d been solving transferred to her, and she felt the impact of it like a blow, landing squarely in her chest.

She wondered how often he let other people in, considering for a moment that perhaps she was not the first, but then she dismissed it nearly as quickly. She knew, after all, which of his motions looked practiced and which of them did not. He wasn’t accustomed to someone being this close to him. This was visibly unrehearsed.

wondered, first, how long it had taken for Regan to lose her sense of wonder with her own life, but then secondly, whether she’d ever had any to begin with.

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

did you take your pills? Did you hold them in your hands, cradle them between the lines of your palms, and let them remind you how ill you are, how sick, how desperate?

But he hadn’t even said that, not really, and now she felt nothing but loathing for the way she could only hate herself and still place no blame on him.

You asked too much of me, she thought to say. You wanted more from me than I am even worth.

She doesn’t want to take them anymore. She doesn’t like what they do to her, how lost they make her feel. Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not.

he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with. These are distinct, doesn’t she realize?

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.

She doesn’t want to be happy. You can’t make her happy, you know why? Because some people know how to fucking coexist and Regan doesn’t, she doesn’t want to, she never will.

Aldo had thoughts about compulsion and craving, about the differences between them, and now, he thought, Which was he?