“She was right wasn't she? that humans were inherently flawed, hindered by their insubstantial life expectancies, by mortality itself. …but if not him, then who would have all the rest? He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem… It was a fucking mystery and Aldo couldn't sit idly by while there were mysteries afoot… I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.”
TITLE—Alone with You in the Ether
AUTHOR—Olivie Blake
PUBLISHED—2022 (orig. 2020)
PUBLISHER—Tom Doherty Associates (orig. self-published)
GENRE—literary fiction
SETTING—Chicago
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Chicago, fate, the universe, moments & threads, art & museums, academia, bees, mental illness (bipolar) rep (MC), autistic-coded love interest, m/f allo romance, psychotropic medication, complicated families, lies & Truth, intimacy & personal relationships, to truly know someone, intellectual conversations, witty dialogue, falling in love, doctoral student + art museum docent romance, forgiveness, cravings vs compulsions, addiction
Premise:
Well… it’s first & foremost… a love story.
“I thought maybe we could be friends,” he said. “Or, if that sounds like too much work, then maybe we can have five more conversations.”
My thoughts:
I kept putting off writing this review because how do I talk about the latest addition to my “most important book I’ve ever read in my life” list. This is the list composed exclusively of books that have taught me something very intimate about myself, like the unlocking of one of the few doors left inside of me that I did not even know I had not opened yet.
So how to talk about a book in which I was—am—so invested in on such a visceral & emotional level? This is the most intensely passionate & romantic book I have ever read. But it transcends even the idea of what “romance” or “romanticness" even is—I would even venture so far as to say it *defines* it on some level.
“She's your... you know, your provocateur, she's your disturbance.”
The connection between the two MCs doesn’t merely transcend physical chemistry but demonstrates how a deep intellectual & emotional connection can manifest in real & illuminating physical intimacy. & how, in such a love, the dichotomies of pain & pleasure, fear & faith, humor & anger, exhaustion & enervation, danger & safety, home & exile, are no longer opposites, no longer separate from each other, but forever entwined in a dazzling double-helix of wholeness, of rightness, beyond anything humans have ever imagined themselves to be capable, to be *worthy* of.
“Aldo, Regan said behind closed eyes, did you learn anything about me? (Haven't you been paying enough attention to run?)”
There is something so indescribably precious about being seen for who one truly is—for *all* of who one is—& not loved in *spite* of who one is but deeply & sincerely *because* of it, which, to my mind, has always been the ultimate manifestation of “true love.” This book explores in so much depth what that might look like in a way I have never seen done in literature—indeed in any kind of art—before. I may never stop rereading this book.
I would recommend this book to readers who love deeply passionate love stories with themes of mental illness, art, & complicated families. This book is best read in bed on a cool, sunny morning, the windows open to a soft breeze, the bedsheets atangle, the smell of coffee wafting up from the kitchen, & a whole day of lazy indulgence ahead of you…
Final note: In a way then, I suppose, this book is a clue to one of *my* keys.
“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 were 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.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CW // drug use & addiction (overdose), mental illness (bipolar), suicidal thoughts, sexual content
Season: late Summer (for the angsty romance bits) / early Fall (for the intellectual art museum bits)
Music pairing: “Fur Elise,” by Faouzia; “Animaux Fragiles,” by Ycare, & Zaz; Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”
Further Reading—
LOTE by Shola von Reinhold
Read my review for LOTE here.
THE STOLEN HEIR and THE PRISONER’S THRONE by Holly Black
PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE by Helen Oyeyemi
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh
NO GODS NO MONSTERS by Cadwell Turnbull (bc of the bees & multiverse discussions)
Read my review for WE ARE THE CRISIS here. (Book 2 of the Convergence Saga)
THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern
WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Brontë
What’s Up Doc (1972)
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
DEVOTION by Hannah Kent
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger
I earn commissions from the sponsored links to my shop on bookshop.org which allow me to keep my content like Book Reviews & Reading Lists free to all subscribers. <3
Favorite Quotes—
(I literally highlighted like half of this book so… this is just a heavily edited selection…)
“Considering it was Aldo who had altered the shapes and paths of her thinking, it was probably his fault that she now considered everything in terms of time. Her own hypothesis was fairly elementary: There was a single moment responsible for every sequence thereafter.”
“With Regan, everything came down to sacredness. She liked, in the time between docent tours, to wander her favorite parts of the Art Institute, which she typically selected to match the religiosity of her moods. Which was not to say she gravitated to religious art specifically; more often she aimed to match her private longings with the god (who was sometimes God, but not always) being worshipped through a polished frame. In early Catholic paintings, she looked for awe. In modern work, for sleekness. In contemporary, the vibrancy of dislocation. Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. 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.”
“She wondered what she was doing out there in all those mirror-shards of lives unlived.”
“It didn't keep him from wishing he could walk out of the room, turn a corner, and head in an entirely different direction.”
“What good was choice if he could still only have one outcome at a time?”
“’Those,’ Aldo said, ‘sound like lies. Or possibly someone else's truths.’”
“The more the bee has to protect its hive, the less honey it produces.”
“’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.”
“This was no good, she thought dully. This wasn't even close to enough. She had a voracity she could never quite quench, a fear she couldn't stifle, a sense of dread lingering constantly overhead. She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn't like needy, so she'd learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces. Flaws, she thought, were just vacancies to be filled.”
“It was a relief, she reminded herself, not to be beholden to impossible expectations. Or even to meager ones.”
“Sometimes Aldo thought a fall was precisely what he was waiting for.”
“’I think,’ he said, ‘that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.’
‘A whole set of them?’
‘Oh, almost definitely,’ he replied. ‘I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.’”
“Regan was her usual name for herself, but when she was here she was Charlotte, whom Aldo had begun to see as an entirely separate identity. Charlotte, for example, was a dimmer Regan upon entering the house she'd grown up in; almost as if the effort of trying to fill this space, easily accomplished in every other place, had sapped her of the energy required for certain facets of her personality.”
“’Mm.’ He took another drag, already more at ease. Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. 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. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. 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.”
“…did you take your pills? Did you hold them in your hands, cradle them between the lines of your palms, and let them remind you how ill you are, how sick, how desperate?”
“You want him to want you, don't you? You want to feel him like an anchor, like a weight. You want all of him dragging you down, binding you to something. You want him to pull you close like this, like this dance that is not a dance but is more of a dance than anything you've ever done with anyone, but you don't even know the steps, do you, Charlotte?”
“Everyone sees through you. Everyone sees through you and on the other side of you is the way life looks without you, and inevitably they will run straight for it with relief.”
“Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you're the kind of person people leave?”
“You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It's the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.”
“You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn't know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn't love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that's drugs. You know drugs, don't you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.”
“The glow from the window illuminated pieces of their silhouettes, her right side and his left. With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other's reflection.”
“You asked too much of me, she thought to say. You wanted more from me than I am even worth.”
“Art. She'd never even been good at it, not really. Not in the way he would expect from her, and not in the way he would want. Her art would not satisfy him because it wasn't art at all, wasn't anything. Art was emotional truth and she had none of that, not one single truth, and this bag was proof of it along with everything else. And anyway, it was one of her failures, and those were meant to belong exclusively to her.”
“…we have here an overprivileged child, a child with too much imagination, a child who never learned to submit herself to the authority of reality, a child who became a woman who still hadn't learned, and who would never learn, which gambles were worth it to take.”
“This wasn't a painting made to satisfy the heart, but rather to buy the groceries. It occurred to her that this was what her father had meant when he’d said "austere." Regan, with her art historian eye, understood upon viewing the painting that he had meant severe, distant, emotionless. Devoid of meaning, in her eyes.
“Austere. It's a cold word, Aldo had said once, the memory of it igniting her with a chill.
“The subject matter was an architectural landscape. All hard lines, soulless verticality. This was beauty? … Lines like that would be incredibly easy to recreate. Replication, redundancy, recidivism. The whole painting was nothing special… it was nothing particularly impressive. How had her father loved that painting so much? How had he mistaken something so trite for brilliance? … This was nothing. This painting was nothing. His approval was nothing... He would miss genius if it slapped him across the face, if it backhanded him with malice, if it tore free from its constraints to defenestrate itself from the window, if it lay awake in his guest room for the entirety of the night... This painting isn't beautiful. You have never understood beauty and all the worse for you, you never will.”
“It didn't feel the way she thought it would. Not like it had in the past. This time it was more like live wire, electricity in her bones, catching fire. You and me together, you-and-me-together, you and me. It was a thought that woke her from slumber, like inspiration or a stomachache. It was a notion that could not be doused, couldn't be extinguished, except by the motion of her brush. She was painting to quiet her thoughts, the way they scribbled themselves in her mind, leaping and darting like insects, alighting on different planes.”
“You and me, you and me, you and me, Aldo, Aldo, Rinaldo, I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice. The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.”
“It's a fire. I used to burn out, now I just burn.”
“Maybe he'd done it, he thought. Maybe some version of him had gone back in time, changed it, fixed it somehow, unlocked the door that she'd never ended up opening and that had somehow brought her back. Maybe he'd solved it, somewhere, and his current self would never even know.”
“Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax; endless concepts to express with boundless opportunities to express them, but only a finite number of ways to do it. Color, line, shape, space, texture, and value, six elements in total, which was newly revelatory to her until she realized why, running her finger along the edge of the key.”
“Why him? asked the mimicry from her father's study. ‘Because,’ she said. Because I know he'll sit for me. Because I know he won't mock me, won't suffocate me, won't kill this fragile little thing I've found, this fledgling breath I've taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he's the thing I can't unsee. Because I don't know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I've already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.”
“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…”
“Time.
Once upon a time.
Time to begin.
Time and time again.
Time after time.
Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.”
“She couldn't prevent the urge to know his thoughts. She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he'd secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.”
“’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.”
“She wouldn't throw her phone in the river or the lake. That was running away, which she wasn't doing. She wasn't running away. She wasn't running at all. She was coming back, and it would only look and feel like running until she knocked on Aldo's door and he pulled it open, and then it would go like this:
Are you ready?
And she would say: Yes, I'm ready.”
“Where are we in the cosmos, because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?”
“Consumption, that's what this is. He is being willingly eaten alive.”
“They should have showered, probably, but he likes that she's all over him. Makes him feel holier that way, shrouded in something that contains no doubt. He wears the smell of her draped over his shoulders, where her legs have been. No one else knows the lengths he has gone, the man he has become since touching her. He thinks of all the other versions of himself making love to all the other versions of her and resolves to pluck them out of their alternate realities, out of their alternate spaces and times, to place them in this one. He hopes she has not developed the ability to read his mind, that she isn't seeing herself bent over the pew or perched, queenly, atop the altar, with his rapturous head between her legs. He is especially worshipful this Sunday. This particular Sunday, he willingly falls to his knees.”
“He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.
The sixth time, he notices paint flecks on her arms, a little on her cheek. He laughs, What were you painting? She says very seriously, You, always you, I can't help it. Only you these days. Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, Jesusfuck-ing Christ what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me.
He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please.
She kisses him back and she does.”
“The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before.”
“…at first she thinks she loves Rinaldo Damiani the same way she loved the boy on the train. As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.”
“Before she knows it, she's confessing other things: I'm actually not very good at anything in particular. I'm not really very smart. People don't know it right away, but eventually they sort it out. Sometimes I think: No wait I'm lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren't I? So that must mean everyone else is right.”
“…she can leave any time if she wants to, so long as she comes back.
Fine, but only because he said that last bit. She's tired of people telling her she's free to leave, she hates it.
He doesn't want her to leave at all but there's a whole thing in the rule book about letting people have agency. "If it's meant to be" and all that.
She thinks that's bullshit, can't people just hold on?
He agrees.”
“Of course he signed up for it, it's what he wants. Why should someone else get her highs and lows? He wants them all, selfishly, possessively. He wants to have them…”
“…he doesn't want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with. These are distinct, doesn't she realize? Does she have any idea how difficult he finds it to exist with other people? And then here she is, this mystery, this puzzle, does she even know how much he loves her unpredictability, her twists and turns? She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems.”
“He liked that. He liked it, how grabby she was, how selfishly insistent. He liked her even when she was stingy, when she was ungenerous. He liked her best when she was saying, with the twist of her fingers, You are already mine.”
“He knows this expression of hers means not now I'm thinking, he knows this one means yes now but one second, he knows this one means don't bother speaking, just take off your clothes, I don't know why you wear them. He knows her relationships are complicated. He knows whose calls she takes and which ones she ignores. He knows, as her doctor doesn't know, that she isn't taking her pills. He knows that she hears her mother's voice in her head and sometimes she loses her own voice inside it; he knows she finds it again when he takes her face in his hands and says: Are you in there? He knows so much; he knows almost everything.”
“Rinaldo Damiani knows how to love me, and I didn't even think to put it on the list.”
“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.”
“‘I think maybe it might be unhealthy, but fuck it, I don't know, who even gets to decide what's healthy?’ She sounded confident, coldly irreverent. ‘We don't even understand time, so how are we possibly supposed to understand health, which is a concept we made up? I don't just feel differently about you—I feel more, a lot more. It's like you woke up something inside me and it won't be quiet. It refuses to calm down, and why should it? It's not like “Oh, you make me happy,” it's not something as clichéd as that. You make me feel like I'm alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I'm not just a goddamn waste of time.’”
"You let me be me, I like you when you're you. Why is that bad?”
“Stop, I'm just a human man…”
“…she thought to herself: 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 she'd confused pure physicality for the sensation of being whole. She didn't feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself. Like she and eternity and omnipotence were the same, or like omniscience could be equated to the sound of his ragged breath in her ear. She wanted him to mess her up, deplete her, to deliver her to something lesser, something baser. Something less inclined to rational thought, and instead diminished only to sensations.”
“This was vastness—and was it him? Was it her? Was it them? Maybe it was all of it, maybe it was everything, maybe he and she were a little speck of everything when they were touching like this, bound to tiny particles in the air. To things that science had yet to find or name or see.”
“If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.”
“Aldo, I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don't know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I'm afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that? No, you're never afraid, you have numbers and thoughts and your genius to keep you warm. You don't need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you in gratitude and you will always be kind, you're just made that way. You'll let me do it but eventually I will make you unhappy, and then it will be on me to leave, because you are much too good to give me the ending we both know I deserve.”
“He feels more like home than my home…”
“The idea that even he didn't recognize happiness when he felt it was comforting, in some way. She was comforted by knowing he was equally as stupid and hopeless as she was.”
“He could look back on himself, time-traveling through retrospect, and see that he was in love with her right away, though he’d given it other names at the time: curiosity, interest, attraction.”
“She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before… Charlotte Regan, Aldo realized, loved change, unhealthily. She loved it like an obsession, like infatuation. With change she had an ongoing affair, and perhaps it had been neutralized for a time with pills and psychotherapy but underneath it all, the little monster that was her soul was clawing for it, and it had been Aldo who'd hauled it out again. He'd unleashed a titan, he'd freed her, fallen in love with her, and as much as he'd hoped it would relent to something manageable, it did not.”
“So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.
He studied her, as that was in his nature. For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.”
“Can you really understand someone without knowing what brings them pleasure?”
“He smiled at her like: Isn't it great? Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.”
“He woke me up, she wanted to scream; he woke me, and for that I will always rely on him, I will be to him what he is to math, and can't you see how fragile that is? Can't you see how intangibly I exist, and how perilously? Can't you see that I—the me that I am right now, sitting here with you at this moment—am a figment of his imagination? 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?”
“’You think I don't know that there's something wrong with me?’ He looked strangely disenchanted, like he'd woken from something. (He can always undream me, unbelieve me.) ‘It's all my father ever tells me, Regan. My brain is broken,’ Aldo said robotically, ‘and your brain is broken, but we can't both be broken. One of us has to be fixable—no, one of us has to be fixed, or else—‘
‘Or else what?’ It came out sharply escalated. ‘What happens, Aldo, if you can't fix me?’”
“Too many people had refused when she had wished that they would beg her to stay, and now, because of them, she had let him go so easily, unclenching all her fingers at once.”
“On the one hand, she wanted to bear his entire sadness for him; to hurt herself doubly, just to keep it from him, and was that illness or love? Was she really so broken that she wanted to suffer to spare him…”
“It was something new to curate, Regan thought: the possibility that she could haunt him or free him, and that whatever she did or did not do was entirely up to her. The immensity of it was crippling. Bearing the responsibility for what happened when two people fractured and bled was not something she’d ever attempted before, and she felt weakened by the prospect of it now.”
“Why had he left, why hadn't he said to her this time, ‘I love your brain even when I fear it,’ why why why? The effort of asking herself felt like the loneliest thing of all, and the silence that followed was deafening.”
“Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.”
“It isn't pretty, he wanted to say, it's lonely, it's desolate, it's a chilling portrait of vastness. 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? Pretty, that's what you think this is? You think that's all she's capable of? You fool, she's done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn't, it's Truth. She told The Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, ‘Oh, this is pretty.’”
“‘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.’”
“I painted the world as you saw it, so it was theft, sort of, but no, it wasn't, because we made it together. This is our love, do you see it? This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn't, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.”
“Because you and I, we are so different, aren't we, and yet we are more like each other than the rest of the world is like us, and for that I bless you, 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.”
“Well, he thinks time is some sort of cycle or loop, right? But seeing as it's more likely to be a hexagon than a circle, because of nature etc. etc., that means time must have corners.
So, she could turn a corner and end up as . . . what, exactly?
She’d still be herself, only she'd be herself as she would have been in the direction time was moving at that point.
Okay, so say she turned a corner and she was . . . maybe eighteen years old or something, but say she carried with her some vague memory of who she'd been before. Could she do that?
She can do anything she wants. (He sounds like he means it.)
Okay, cool, so she turns a corner, she's eighteen, it's a past that isn't her actual past, so she's in love with him but she doesn't know it yet.”
“Fuck, she knows what it is. It's a fucking perfect circle.
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.
He can believe whatever he wants; she knows it's a perfect circle.”
“The point is, maybe it works or maybe it doesn't, but they just keep trying and doing it over until it does. Right?
That sounds like a lot of uncertainty.
Of course it is! 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.”
“She is this version of herself because of him, and vice versa. There's no changing that now.”
“Because when they embark, they will have each turned a corner. And everything will be as it was, only very slightly different.”