Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

his apricock.

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.

All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.

I was afraid when he showed up, afraid when he failed to, afraid when he looked at me, more frightened yet when he didn’t.

Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him?

finding out you’re gay feeling fr

“Better now?” he asked afterward.

The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

If I read it now it would ruin my day. But if I put off reading it, the whole day would become meaningless, and I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else.

It was the underside of fear I loved, like the smoothest wool found on the underbelly of the coarsest sheep. I loved the boldness that was pushing me forward; it aroused me, because it was born of arousal itself.

I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew.

Domestic bliss. Just because he’d let me be his top last night.

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.

On the train I told him about the day we thought he’d drowned and how I was determined to ask my father to round up as many fishermen as he could to go look for him, and when they found him, to light a pyre on our shore, while I grabbed Mafalda’s knife from the kitchen and ripped out his heart, because that heart and his shirt were all I’d ever have to show for my life. A heart and a shirt. His heart wrapped in a damp shirt—like Anchise’s fish.

WTF. and longest sentence ever.

Then we’d shower and go out and feel like two exposed, live wires giving off sparks each time they so much as flicked each other.

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.

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