Find Me

by André Aciman

I am thinking of you. I love you, play.

Since I couldn’t give you and your loved ones shelter, I’ll never play again.

After what they’ve done to you, music is dead to me.

But you must play. For the love of me, never stop...

I am gone, but please find me, play for me?

We’re taught to rehearse for the death of loved ones before we know what death even is. The irony is that the Kaddish is the only prayer one cannot use on oneself.”

you can’t recite it and be dead at the same time.”

It doesn’t deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played.

Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life.

Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished.

We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not ...

Living means dying with regrets stuck...

by the time we learn to live, it’s alr...

What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough. In my case, I’d like to think it will be you, even if we’re no longer together. It’s like already knowing who will be the one who’ll shut my eyes. I want it to be you, Elio.”

Beneath all the layers we uncovered today, I know there is one person for you, and I don’t believe it’s me.”

“The one thing I want in this life is for you to find happiness. The rest …”

“I’m sure there must have been someone who bruised you once, or scarred you.”

“Some people leave us scuttled and damaged.” I thought awhile. “In my case I’m the one who did the scuttling, yet I’m the one who never recovered.”

“Italy, of course. They do things differently there.”

I’d never envied him. Now I’d trade his lot for mine in a second.

What he didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that this same Arioso was what I’d heard played for me some twenty years before when, then too, I was the one departing.

I’m listening. And you know, you do know I’ve been floundering all these years. I know. But so have I.

What lovely music you used to play for me. I wanted to. So you haven’t forgotten. Of course I haven’t.

perhaps all I wanted was for them to bring back something from my past, because it was the past, or something like the past, like memory, or maybe not just memory, but tiers and layers deeper, like life’s invisible watermark that I still wasn’t seeing.

It’s me, isn’t it, it’s me you’re looking for, me the music summons up tonight.

We’re still the same, we haven’t drifted.

I try to remind him each time that he has no reason to forgive me.

You fool, it takes two of them to make one of me. I can be man and woman, or both, because you’ve been both to me. Find me, Oliver. Find me.

And all there is, is you. All I think of is you.

Are you thinking of me tonight?

It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I’m no longer sure I know what that means, being in love.

Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me.

Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.

Italy was a chapter we never discussed.

Because my life stopped there. Because I never really left. Because the rest of me here has been like the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across the Atlantic in that wonderful house by the sea. I’ve been away for far too long.

would he, like me, still long for an old and only love, trying not to think of some unknown soul who, just like me tonight some fifty years before, had longed for a beloved

For twenty years you’ve lived a dead man’s life. Everyone knows. Even your wife and your children and your wife’s friend, and the couple you met at a conference on the Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich can read it on your face. Erica and Paul know it, and those scholars who study Greek fire and Greek triremes, even the Pre-Socratics themselves, dead two thousand years ago, can tell. The only one who doesn’t know is you. But now even you know.

You’ve been disloyal. To what, to whom? To yourself.

you never changed into the one person you could have been and knew you really were, and you never redressed the one mistake that threw your life off course and now you were forever trapped doing the very last stupid thing you were doing,

I was already dead—and yet too young, too young to die.

Find me, he says. I will, Oliver, I will,

for once in my life knew where I wanted to be and what I had to do.

You know I’ll always wait up, even if you get here at four a.m. All these years, I’ve waited up, do you think I won’t wait up a few more hours now?

Waiting up is what we’ve done all our lives, waiting up allows me to stand here remembering Bach’s music playing at my end of our planet and letting my thoughts go out to you, for all I want is to think of you, and sometimes I don’t know who’s the one thinking, you or I.

I know, Elio.

Did I ever tell you his name? My father named him after you. Oliver. He never forgot you.

my Oliver without either of us moving away

despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago under this same roof.

“I haven’t been kissed like that in so long,”

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.