Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

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.

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.

How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking? How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself?

It would never have entered my mind because I was still under the illusion that, barring what I’d read in books, inferred from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with men and women.

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.

No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

there are certain wishes that must be clipped like wings off a thriving butterfly.

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.

If youth must canter, then who’ll do the galloping?

are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.

This, I think, is the first time I dared myself to stare back at him. Usually, I’d cast a glance and then look away—look away because I didn’t want to swim in the lovely, clear pool of his eyes unless I’d been invited to—and I never waited long enough to know whether I was even wanted there; look away because I was too scared to stare anyone back; look away because I didn’t want to give anything away; look away because I couldn’t acknowledge how much he mattered.

There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can’t you?

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.

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

Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It’s the asshole, stupid.

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.

“For you, however you think of it, it’s still fun and games, which it should be. For me it’s something else which I haven’t figured out, and the fact that I can’t scares me.”

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

Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?

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

“Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered.

Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb.

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 fee...

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

surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt.

it would finally dawn on us both that 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.

If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.