Alone With You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.

This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.

How many ways were there to feel sex, to suffer it, to describe it?

She was colossal like this, the enormity of what she was now steadily irrepressible, ebullient for being in his arms; Kiss me again, please, don’t stop, oh god don’t stop. He would never, he wouldn’t, but still, please don’t, we’ll shrink down to human-sized when we’re done but for now, stay like this with me; see the magnitude of being, see existence through my eyes; don’t blink or you might miss it.

Charlotte Regan, Aldo suspected, had never lived a day twice in her entire life.

would be cradled in the palms of her hands.

How dangerous! What a fool he was, how shortsighted, how little-lived he’d been not to feel her fear as she felt it.

Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

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?

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.

Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

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

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? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time?

Science without faith is crippled, Masso, and life without it is soulless. She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly.

All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.

I condemn you, I sanctify you, I sustain you. This painting, Aldo, it’s about God. They cannot hang it in the Louvre, they will have to put it in the Vatican, because what we are is holy, and this, you and me as one together, is transubstantiation of the highest degree. This is you and me becoming the consecration of us; amen, above everything, I believe.

Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him. Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.

There are no perfect circles, Regan. Yes, there’s one, and it’s this one: They fall in love because they’re always in love. That’s circular, not a circle.

Everything is uncertain, he and she both know that by now, but there is a smaller certainty within all of the uncertainty, which is: The Truth. And what, he asks, is The Truth? That she will keep turning corners until she finds him.

There are still bills to be paid and things to be said and they will argue in shades of purple as early as tomorrow, but they are different now; changed.