Alone With You in the Ether

You can’t fix me,” she whispered to him, her mouth tracing his neck. Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks?

“I don’t see anything to fix,” he said

He was a lover of all things beautiful, all things sensual, though he loved them best as a caretaker, a keeper.

She just found the whole thing very strange, and he’d stuck in her brain a little bit, embedding himself there like a thorn. Like something on the tip of her tongue or hovering just at the edge of her periphery.

That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

There was a single moment responsible for every sequence thereafter.

Luckily, Aldo was not a ‘right now’ sort of person. It had once been a quality that frustrated the other people in his life, but he’d gotten rid of most of them by now.

Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

It was about time for a new paring knife

That doesn’t count as one of the six

No, it totally is. You gave yourself an impossible problem so you’d never be able to stop thinking about it. It’s brilliant, actually.” She sounded close to impressed.