Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.

that there are easy ways to bring back summer in the snowstorm.

that his hair, turning blonder every day, caught the sun before the sun was completely out in the morning;

Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.

Here was someone who lacked for nothing.

There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona. Love,

which exempts no one who’s loved from loving, Francesca’s words in the Inferno.

No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.

“If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.”

At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?

Would my descendants know what was spoken on this very piazzetta today? Would anyone? Or would it dissolve into thin air, as I found part of me wishing it would?

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember.

I wanted to flee the house. I wanted it to be next fall already and be as far away as I could.

What would happen if I saw him again? Would I bleed again, cry, come in my shorts?

wean myself a bit at a time each day, like an addict, one day, one hour, one minute, one slop-infested second after the other. It could be done.

vis-à-vis

languorous

This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are.

People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

“Not that

you mean to hurt anyone, but because you’re always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you.

of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me,

“Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,”

chamomile-scented laundry detergent,

so loneliness can be a cruel thing when you’ve had a bit to drink and are on the verge of touching the first stranger that comes your way—they’re all beautiful there, but you pay for a smile by the shot glass.”

“Stasera non dormo, tonight I won’t be able to sleep, the wages of poetry,”

“I wish I had one friend I wasn’t destined to lose.”

affectation.

write about the person I know no one knows

I

am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centu...

But if the job of poetry, like that of wine, is to help us see double, then I propose another toast until we’ve drunk enough to see the world with four eyes—and, if we’re not careful, with eight.”

“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.

Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished

“Look,” he interrupted. “You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better.

We rip out

so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel ...

Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

“Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma. You look around you and you find that your wife has left you, your children, whose childhood you totally missed out on, are grown men, some are married, your parents have died long ago, you have no friends, and that tiny face staring at you through goggles belongs to none other than your grandson, who’s been brought along to welcome Gramps from his long sleep. Your face in the mirror is as white

as Rip Van Winkle’s. But here’s the catch: you’re still twenty years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be twenty-four in a second—I am twenty-four. And if you pushed the parable a few years further up, I could wake up and be younger than my elder son.”

“Part of it—just part of it—was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have—live, that is—more than two parallel lives.”

We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

staring out from your world to my world,