Find Me

by André Aciman

“Someone who knew me inside out, who was me in you,

“I could have missed our train and never known how dead I’ve been all my life.”

“That tomorrow this could blow away. It doesn’t have to.”

“Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.”

Lobbies never age. We don’t either,

Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.

“Each of us is like a moon that shows only a few facets to earth, but never its full sphere.

“Where did they invent you?”

“I love phantom Rome

“I want it to be with you. If those we know won’t have us the way we are, let’s get rid of them. I want to read every book you’ve read, hear the music you love, go back to the places you know and see the world with your eyes, learn everything you cherish, start life with you.

“The world according to you and me.

There’s a man who knows life, I thought, I didn’t want us to stop talking.”

“You do make me love who I am.”

“I hope the day never comes when you make me hate myself. Now tell me again when you knew about us.”

So I carved her symbol on me to remember. If You could tattoo my soul with her name,

“‘Heaven is heaven. It doesn’t get better than this.

if I give you an hour now, you’ll want a day, and if I give you a day, you’ll want a year. I know your type.’

You’re oxygen to me, and I’ve been living off methane.”

you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us.

“Love is easy,” I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both.

your love for Oliver.”

it marks a moment where for a short while I held life in my hands and was never the same afterward. Sometimes I think that my life stopped here and will only restart here.”

And now ten years later, when I look at this wall under this old streetlamp, I am back with him and I swear to you, nothing has changed.

When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I’d be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back.”

‘Look for me, find me.’”

All I can do when I’m alone is whisper his name in the dark. But then I laugh at myself. I just pray I’ll never whisper it when I’m with someone else.”

I envy the two of you. Please don’t ruin it.”

Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.”

Unseen but always there.”

“Doesn’t settle it at all. Why haven’t you gone after him, even if he is married? Why give up so easily?”

“Nothing belongs to the past.”

“You still think of him, don’t you?”

He was my first.”

“At some point in your life you will need to call him. The moment will come. It always does.

So he did remember the man who’d got away and thrown my life off course.

I didn’t want the events of the morning to brush away the feeling or the memory of last night,

I think I’m happy.

It’s been years since I’ve been like this with anyone.

he never really died for me. He’s just absent. Sometimes it’s almost as though he might change his mind and slip in through a back door somewhere. Which is why I’ve never really mourned him. He’s still around—just elsewhere.”

There is no one to remember my father with.”

just pass it on to someone who’ll know exactly what to do with it.’

‘Find someone,’

‘You’re making me remember, and I don’t want to remember,’

But a part of me would die to have you speak to my younger self, to have had you here in this house when I was your age. The irony is that with you I feel your age, not mine. I am sure there’ll be a price to pay for this.”

“This, today, like yesterday,” he said, “like Thursday, like Wednesday, has been a gift. I could so easily never have found you, or never run into you again.”

“I adore you, Elio, I adore you.”

“Being with you reminds me of him,”

“No, because you and he are the standard. Now that I think of it, there’s only been the two of you. All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.”

You die and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You’re extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn’t drop ashes.”

The score was his love letter to a young pianist, his secret missive. Play it for me. Say Kaddish for me. Remember the tune? It’s hidden in there, under the Beethoven, next to the Mozart, find me.