Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

you’re basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you’re forced to call I want.

What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and apathy have ways of instantly repealing all truces and resolutions signed in sunnier moments.

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. Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever.

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.

I knew that wishing them my best and longing for recovery had nothing to do with what I still wanted from him.

Did he ignore me the way I ignored him that morning: on purpose, to draw me out, to protect himself, to show I was nothing to him? Or was he oblivious, the way sometimes the most perceptive individuals fail to pick up the most obvious cues because they’re simply not paying attention, not tempted, not interested?

It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.

“Everyone knows. Because I have leukemia.” “But you’re so beautiful, so healthy-looking, and so smart,” he protested.

Bc only dumb uggos gets lukemeia

both of them begging me to play more tennis, go dancing more often, get to know people, find out for myself why others are so necessary in life and not just foreign bodies to be sidled up to.

The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me, I’ve lived and suffered through all of them, and more than once—some I’ve never gotten over and others I’m as ignorant about as you are today, yet I know almost every bend, every toll-booth, every chamber in the human heart.

I was not unhappy. I wanted to be with someone. But it didn’t trouble me that I was alone.

Every day, if I don’t mess things up, we can ride into town and be back, and even if this is all he is willing to give, I’ll take it—I’ll settle for less, even, if only to live with these threadbare scraps.

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

A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality.

I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.

If I’m stupid, let me be stupid. If I touch his knee, so I’ll touch his knee. If I want to hug, I’ll hug.

I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.

“All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won’t be here. I don’t know what I’ll do then. At least you’ll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.”

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

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

How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a Lemonsoda on a muggy night like this around the gleaming slate cobblestones of Rome with someone’s arm around me.

This would cure me

I had rehearsed losing him not just to ward off suffering by taking it in small doses beforehand, but, as all superstitious people do, to see if my willingness to accept the very worst might not induce fate to soften its blow.

You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can’t bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.

He might then add his usual bromide about how rare good friendships were and that, even if people proved difficult to be with after a while, still, most meant well and each had something good to impart.

“What lies ahead is going to be very difficult,” he started to say, altering his voice. His tone said: We don’t have to speak about it, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what I’m saying.

“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. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.”

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 nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”

But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.

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

We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.

we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.”

They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead.

“And on that evening when we grow older still we’ll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”