Find Me

by André Aciman

“Maybe thinking makes me look glum.”

Walking around Rome with him is itself a vigil.

I suspect there must be someone.

There was someone quite a while back and I did ask if there was anyone now, but all he did was shake his head and say, ‘Don’t ask, Papa, don’t ask.’

“I don’t know if I’m the type who even likes people, much less falls in love with them.”

“Is it that you don’t like people, or that you just grow tired of them and can’t for the life of you remember why you ever found them interesting?”

“It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.”

But we’re just two roommates pretending to have a life together.

My love for him has changed. It’s no longer a spontaneous love, but a brooding, cautious, caregiver’s love.

Some of us never jumped to

the next level. We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started.”

“Perhaps because I am always trying to retrace my steps back to a spot where I should have jumped on the ferryboat headed to the other bank called life but ended up dawdling on the wrong wharf or, with my luck, took the wrong ferryboat altogether. It’s all an older man’s game,

“Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we’ve given up hoping they could.”

We were alone together—until one day one of us broke the pickle dish.”

Loneliness. I can’t stand being by myself yet I can’t wait to be alone.

away from a man I won’t ever love, but I would much rather talk to a stranger.

‘We’re all this way.’”

Let’s not make this the stereotypical moment that happens on a train and then stays on the train like an umbrella or a forgotten pair of gloves left behind somewhere. I know I’ll regret it.

This, I presumed, was how she loved: fiercely, no holds barred.

“Knowing that the end is near is one thing,”

“but believing it is quite another.

Men were like matches: they caught fire and were shaken off and dropped in the first ashtray that came her way.

“As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others.”

“To me it proves that life and time are not in sync.

Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough.

we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life.

Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be li...

Because death, contrary to what everyone tells you, is not part of life.

because he is standing before the tombstone of someone who feels more like a dead son than a dead father.”

Ultimately, it is the living who’ll close the ledger of my life, not I.

some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.”

Heartache can be contracted without symptoms.

“The good part is I don’t think you’ve closed the book or given up looking. For happiness, I mean. I like this about you.”

Perhaps all I truly want is to reconnect with the person I used to be

so you won’t forget Miranda.

People trust you and want to open up to you, maybe because they like who they are when they’re with you—like

“Sono senza parole,”

I’m without words right now.

vietato,

Forbidden

someday, this would be a vigil too

“I don’t want to stop knowing you. So there’s the long and the short of it.”

“Maybe because you’re not a present-tense kind of person. This, for instance, is the present tense,”

“For as long as you want, for as long as you live.”

The whole thing was a fantasy. I’d made it all up.

Resentment not that she had lied, or played me, or let her fantasies run wild for a moment and stir mine, all the better to dash them, but that she had changed her mind—and who could blame her for that? Resentment because I had given her my trust, and there was no taking trust back.

After this, I kept thinking, we’ll turn off the lights, lock the doors, pull down the blinds, and learn never to hope again. Not in this lifetime.

“But you found me.”

I couldn’t find you, and you never came.

And always, as ever, the clock is ticking. In the end, I stopped waiting, because I stopped believing that you’d stray into my life because I no longer trusted you existed.

I stopped waiting and learned to live without you.