Olivie Blake

CHICAGO, SOMETIME-Two people meet in the armory of the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. After their meeting, those things do not change. Everything else, however, is slightly different. Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth-that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage-means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes. An intimate study of time and space, ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER is a fantasy writer's magicless glimpse into the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.

Alone With You in the Ether

Emilia Vulliamy

sadie

Ashlyn Barrett

raia – inactive

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Alina

“You should see her work,” he would say the same way someone else might have said: Come outside, come look at the stars.

Maisha Prather

Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

Jennifer Woo

He wasn't just unconventionally handsome, she realized. 

That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don't go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.

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.

“What did you learn?” he asked neutrally. 

That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.

Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art, and she slid her finger along the edge of the storage room key, the jagged edges like teeth scraping over her skin.

Alone With You in the Ether quotes

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