I feel ??? and !!! and shattered and also vulnerably held all at the same time?

Olivie Blake has blended the genre of romance with literary fiction to perfection. This book is so philosophical and contemplative. While Alone With You in the Ether is, on the surface, a romance novel, the exploration of romance moves past the idea of completion or wholeness.

Instead of the romance being fixated on a happy ending, or a mathematical equation with a correct answer, Blake is focused on the transcendent mundanity of connection. Rather than Regan and Aldo being two parts of one whole, they are two imperfect wholes who are expanded by knowing each other. Their connection exemplifies the way another person's thoughts begin to invade your mind, how you begin to see them in your everyday moments, how their perspective becomes layered on top of your own.

So much happens in so little time, and yet so much time passes that you feel like you've begun to inhabit the consciousness of the characters themselves. In essence, that is what this novel is about. The impossibility of existing within someone's consciousness, enough to change them and enough to matter.

Aldo and Regan are such a stunning example of what love feels like for someone who sometimes feels like they might be fundamentally broken. This almost primal fear that if someone truly knew you, they would discover the defect at your core, that everything you love is destined to leave.

Alone With You in the Ether understands that fear so intimately, and Regan and Aldo stand on opposite ends of that abyss. In fact, for a majority of the book, they arguably aren't seeking romance at all, but are asking whether their existence can become indispensable to someone else's. If their minds might be beautiful and valuable enough to be loved and held and absorbed by another.

I don't think I will ever get over the things this novel had to say about time, connection, and the way relationships layer and build over time. These are ideas that often consume me in my daily life, the way our lives are ever-changing in ways that we don't notice as we're weaving them but only become clear in retrospect.

A conversation about bees, a shared meal, noticing something that meant nothing until it mattered to someone who mattered to you. The fear of being unknowable but the hope that another person might nevertheless come to inhabit your consciousness and allow you into theirs.

This existentiality is so genuinely difficult to articulate and surprisingly elusive to explain. There will always be cliches about soulmates, about "finding your better half," but the reality is often so much stranger and so much more understated.

Much like how it feels to know and be known, Alone With You in the Ether is a novel built upon a foundation of accumulation. It happens slowly, stacking up through dozens of conversations and tiny recognitions, until you realize you're no longer observing Aldo and Regan as characters but carrying their questions around inside your own mind.

Blake makes you feel the unbearable fragility of being known at all, acknowledging that to truly let another person into your mind is terrifying because they gain the power to alter it forever. Even more, she insists that this vulnerability is what gives life so much of its meaning. Because love - in all of its forms - may not guarantee happiness, but it allows us, however briefly and imperfectly, to escape the illusion that our consciousness is entirely solitary.

I could write 3,000 words summarizing the plot or identifying the themes or quoting the gorgeous prose, but none of those things fully capture what happened between me and this novel. It's an experience and a perspective that deep down I knew I needed and one that I'm doubtful I'll ever experience in the same way again.

In fact, I suspect that I'll understand what it meant to me more clearly a month, six months, or a year from now than I do today, because I'll have time to look back and finally see all of its layers.