Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

And as I stood inside the abandoned chapel that I had sworn someday to rebuild and make my home, I also knew then that if I had to wait ten years to see Nanni again, I would rather die now. Take me now, I asked, just take me now. I didn’t have such a decade in me. But what I also began to sense after sundown that evening, as I’d already sensed on the evening I stood burning in my nakedness in this old sanctuary, was the certainty that I was lying, that I would indeed be willing to wait and still wait, as those who stop their lives to expiate forgotten crimes are told to wait, because their true punishment is no longer to know whether they’re actually waiting for pardon and grace, or whether what they’ve waited for has long been granted unbeknownst to them, and that they’d lived out the term of their life without ever holding what was theirs to have and theirs alone. This was my first encounter with time. I became a person that evening, and I had him to thank. And blame.