Find Me

by André Aciman

So much time had passed, so many years, and who knew how many of them might turn out to have been the wasted years that, unbeknownst to us, end up making us better people. No wonder I was moved. The child was like our child, and seemed so emphatically prophesied that everything suddenly became clear to me—because there was a reason for the boy’s name, because Oliver had always been of my blood and had always lived in this house, been of this house and of our lives. He was already here before coming to us, before my birth, before they set down the first stone generations ago, and our years in between then and now were but a hiccup in that long itinerary called time. So much time, so many years, and all the lives we’d touched and left behind, as though they could just as easily have never happened, though happen they did—time, as he’d said before we hugged and went to sleep so late that night, time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.