Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

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

It never occurred to me that what had totally panicked me when he touched me was exactly what startles virgins on being touched for the first time by the person they desire: he stirs nerves in them they never knew existed and that produce far, far more disturbing pleasures than they are used to on their own.

Nothing he did or said was unpremeditated.

Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me.

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 don’t know that I asked the question, just as I am not sure I am able to answer it today. Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it—black market, gray market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter?

What a world this was. She was more than twice my age but I could have made love to her this minute and wept with her.

There was a mêlée of sounds.

Everyone was available, lived availably—like the city—and assumed everyone else wished to be so as well. I longed to be like them.

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!”

How you live your life is your business. 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. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”

Was my father someone else? And if he was someone else, who was I?

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

Over the years I’d lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover,

“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, 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.”