Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

thank you for the shape you took in my life but it’s over now, it doesn’t fit.

thinking only that he doesn’t want her to be sorry, that in fact “sorry” from her tongue should be reserved for only the most capital of offenses, such as disappearing from his life forever—

Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

I’m here for however long you want me.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space,

“Besides, if we fuck it up, you can just go back in time and fix it, can’t you? 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. Okay?”

The problem with sharing the same portion of a city with someone for so long was that no places belonged exclusively to you anymore. You shared them, and then forgot to divvy them up after all was said and done. You knew the things he knew, he knew what you knew,

You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that.

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 that I—the me that I am right now, sitting here with you at this moment—am a figment of his imagination? He dreamt me into being. He can always undream me, unbelieve me. He can unmask me, and then what will be left? Will I always fear him as much as I love him? Will I always be only one half of his whole? 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?

She’d given him arrows and he’d shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds.

An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.

Because when they embark, they will have each turned a corner. And everything will be as it was, only very slightly different.