Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

I’d been dreaming of coming back for so long. Everything felt familiar, nothing had changed. And yet everything felt distant, frayed, unreachable, as though something in me were unable to register that all this was real, that so much of it had once belonged to me.

His eyes were too clear. I didn’t know whether I wanted to touch them or swim in them.

But looking into his eyes was like looking down a steep, craggy cliff leading to a billowing green ocean below—you were pulled in and were told not to fight back but warned not to stare, so that you could never look long enough to know why you kept wanting to stare.

“This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard,

We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

Nothing spoke to me. Even jotting a few thoughts in my notebook failed to mean anything. I wanted something and could not begin to know what it was.

Fate always leaves a mark, and those of us who are truly lucky know the signs and how to read them.

Suddenly, I feel a growing access of tenderness for her. Is this love, or just compassion for someone who is chasing after romance, the way I and everyone else craves the luster of romance in our lives?

“We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.”

Sois belle! Et sois triste! Be beautiful and be sad,”

I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what’s called a broken heart.

just a whiff of the brisk night air and it’ll all come back to me: I’m wasting my life, I am so alone. A rush of tenderness fills my heart. But I’m not fooled. Tenderness is sham love, easy love, the muted, civil face of love.

forget work, forget everyone, and let myself sink deeper, because I want to suffer, I want to hurt, I want to feel something, even if I know that thinking of you never lasts long enough,

Everything about you is perfect, willed perfect, deliberate.

The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn.

There is grace, and skill, and follow-through in everything you do. No affectation, no exaggeration, just the thing itself. I envied you.

I wanted to think of you. But nothing stirred there either, except a feeling at once sad yet not unpleasant. I’m in love, aren’t I? Yes, I think so.

it was the first time I had taken something in my chest about you and put it in words out into the real world.

“You make me like who I am and what I want.”

Broken, battered, blighted, wasted love shuddering in a cold alley like an injured pet that had lost its owner and scarcely survived a run-in with a bad dog, was this really love?—without heart, without kindness, without charity, without love, even.

He lived in a future that wouldn’t be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn’t been his either.

I just loved her, I loved her with heartbreak and resentment, because we’d wasted so many years, because there is no love without desire, diffidence, defeat.

Quantum theory is more resilient, I thought. For every life we live, there are at least eight others we can’t begin to touch, much less know the first thing about. Maybe there is no true life or false life—just rehearsals for parts we might never be lucky enough to play.

Perhaps all I am is an idea with a body.

I would survive this easily enough, of course, and grow indifferent, and soon learn to squelch every access of regret.