Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire,

if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.

What’s liking when we’re talking about worshipping?

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

we were not even two men, just two beings. I loved the egalitarianism of the moment. I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew.

From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on—I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it.

It was simply a shy man’s way of holding someone else’s gaze. We were, it finally dawned on me, the two shyest persons in the world.

He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

Like soldiers trained to fight by night, I lived in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness came. Rehearse the pain to dull the pain. Homeopathically.

But this thing that almost never was still beckons,

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”

he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.

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

Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.