Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story

Aldo and Regan’s relationship experiences a temporary fracture, and they each sit alone, reflecting on the evening when the argument took place and what led to their breakup. Aldo can’t pinpoint the moment when everything started to go wrong but knows that it happened the night he and Regan went to her father’s birthday party. Her parents were still put off by him and had also invited Marc, who told Aldo that Regan was caught in a pattern that he was just a part of and would eventually grow tired of him and find something else, just as she had with Marc. Doubts swirled through Aldo’s mind as he wondered whether he and Regan loved each other or just depended on each other. He kicked himself for not recognizing the pattern in her and his place in it. Aldo concludes that the moment when he asked Regan, “You really haven’t changed, have you?” (282) was when things fell apart. Regan had no longer been sleeping and disappeared, sometimes all day, never saying where she was. She became unpredictable, rather than predictably unpredictable, and Aldo could no longer keep up. He started to see his need to be with her as a compulsion or an addiction rather than love.