Page 79 of Alone With You in the Ether

No, she couldn’t have, she wouldn’t have let herself, or the pills wouldn’t have let her. And also, he said it again.

What, love? Probably because he’s not as good a liar as she is.

She knows.

Does that mean she feels the same way?

Did she just blow him or not? (She’s not going to admit it.)

She knows perfectly well that’s not love.

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.

How… incredibly theoretical of him.

Heisa theoretical mathematician.

Okay, well say there’s no pre-established name for it, what does he feel?

She is asking some very difficult questions.

Good, she doesn’t like easy.

He knows. He likes that.

Oh, sothathe likes.

He wants to hold her but he can’t.

He’s holding her right now, see? (He is, loosely.)

Not like that, not physically.

He wants to… mentally hold her?

Kind of. Sure. If she can make sense of that. (She can’t.)

Maybe they should talk about it another time. They have plenty of other times for conversations, he says, and this is when she knows—god, sheknows—that she loves him so deeply and so passionately and so devastatingly that by the time she tells him, the words will inevitably feel empty and small.

The first time they argue, she is sure that she loves him.

But she doesn’t tell him so, not really, not yet.

“Come home with me,”he said.

She made a show of glancing around, stretching out languidly to brush the backs of her knuckles across his chest.

“I thought I was already home with you,” she said, and he shook his head.

“Home home.”

“Homehome?”

“Home home.”

She considered it. Which was perhaps a thing he should have done first, only it was getting increasingly difficult to do things without her, even in his head. She and his thoughts were inextricably linked now, to the point where even math, which had always been pleasing for being solitary, had become profoundly lonely. There were times when he imagined her there in his classroom, considering him from the back of the room: “Aldo, be patient, explain this, you haven’t explained it.” He saw her in his dissertation meetings, sitting beside him: “Aldo, are you sure?”, with her brow furrowed in thought. “But have you considered this, or this, or this,” things she said to him on a regular basis, like a speed bump to his internal narrative. She was always interrupting, stopping him to say in one way or another, That doesn’t make sense. She always needed to look at things from every angle, turning them upside down, peering through keyholes to find the truth.

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