Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

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.

Making love with someone you actually love is very different than hookups

“Do you like being alone?” he asked. “No. No one likes being alone. But I’ve learned how to live with it.”

Growing, I did not like being alone. I started reading and playing videos alot. And Then I reallized. It was ok for me to be alone. I rather be alone then be with people who hated my gayness

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,

“I like the way you say things. Why are you always putting yourself down?” I shrugged my shoulders. Was he criticizing me for criticizing myself? “I don’t know. So you won’t, I suppose.”

Yep, somehow we put ourselves down when we are in love with a great one. We think we are not good enough for them

But passion allows us to hide more, and at that moment on Monet’s berm, if I wished to hide everything about me in this kiss, I was also desperate to forget the kiss by losing myself in it.

thing, let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it’s always themselves they can’t stand being alone with… Traitor, I thought as I waited to hear his bedroom door squeak open and squeak shut.

Everyone goes through a period of traviamento—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

Or: how do you go back to sleep no longer a virgin? There was no coming back from that!

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

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.

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. Suddenly, I began to take mental snapshots of him,

but because by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die.

They’re exotic in the purest sense of the word, and yet not alien.

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.

Rehearse the pain to dull the pain.

I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.

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!”

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.”

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