Find Me

by André Aciman

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.

“You’re never going back,” I whispered. “Tell me you’re not leaving.”

“I’m not leaving. Stop thinking like that.”

The child was our child. The two of us knew it. And my father, who no longer was alive, knew it just as well, had known all along.

“I’ve had to sever many ties and burn bridges I know I’ll pay dearly for, but I don’t want to look back. I’ve had Micol, you’ve had Michel, just as I’ve loved a young Elio and you a younger me. They’ve made us who we are. Let’s not pretend they never existed, but I don’t want to look back.”

“I feared I was starting to forget your face, your voice, your smell, even,”

he had found his own ritual spot not far from his office, overlooking a lake where he would take a few moments on that day to think of our unlived life, his with mine.