laura’s Reviews > Alone With You in the Ether > Status Update

“But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that some put in place.” (2/2)

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen. 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, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone.” (1/2)

‘Afraid, always afraid that this was still some splintered version of pretend, that she was only crafting a new version for him when she wanted to believe she was really herself. Afraid that now she was Aldo’s Regan, which meant that Aldo’s Regan could fade into obscurity; that her honesty with him was just another version of a lie.’

‘She’s surprised he even believes in love.
He doesn’t, not really, but it’s the closest thing to having a name for the concept. It’s like how time only exists within their understanding of what time is, even though time is probably something else entirely. But they still call it time, because that’s what everyone agreed to call it.’

‘He is especially worshipful this Sunday. This particular Sunday, he is willing to fall to his knees.’ stop stop stop 🤭

'Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he'd said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too. He didn't blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.' (2/2)

'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.' (1/2)

'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 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.'

'"Every psychologist has seen some version of me before, I'm sure." He gave her a long, searching look. "Who told you that?" Her doctor. Her lawyer. Ajudge. A jury of her peers. Marc.'

'He wasn't sure what he'd expected. She seemed methodical in a way, with a plan of attack, or at least some sort of sequential geography. She'd said art was precise, and he believed her. He was sure now that she was an artist, whether she believed herself to be or not. She was constantly in the midst of an underpainting, imagining things as they could be before steadily making them true.'