Find Me

by André Aciman

“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?”

“I never stay close with anyone I’ve had a relationship with. Most people don’t like to burn bridges. I seem to blow them up—probably because there wasn’t much of a bridge to start with.

“Men!” she finally said, as though that one word summed up all the shortcomings most women are willing to overlook and learn to put up with and ultimately forgive in the men they hope to love for the rest of their lives even when they know they won’t. “I hate to see anyone hurt.”

I once believed they’d be filled at some point; now I am not sure such spaces are ever filled. Still, I want to understand. 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, you know.”

We’d sit at the same dining table, but weren’t eating together, slept in the same bed but not together,

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

“No. So, why the shrink?” I asked, eager to change the subject. “Me? Loneliness. I can’t stand being by myself yet I can’t wait to be alone.

I liked watching her smoke. She was beautiful and unreachable, and once again I held myself back from putting my arm around her and letting my lips touch her cheek, her neck, the back of her ear.

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

“We all have ways of putting up screens to keep life at bay. I use paper.”

It’s lonely work but it’s lovely and peaceful work.

“His problem is that he forgets to charge them.” “Yes, but they love me and I’ve grown to love each one, we’re always exchanging e-mails. And frankly, I’m not doing it for the money.”

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

“I find these tales very moving, but I still can’t tell why, except that I pick up a suggestion that, despite appearances, living and time are not aligned and have entirely different itineraries.

We laughed because neither of us believed the other was serious.

“You tell me, but tell me now. I don’t need proof, and neither do you. But I don’t want surprises. And I don’t want to get hurt.”

I could just hear my son saying this when I saw him tomorrow and told him about the girl on the train called Miranda who took me to her father’s house and made me want things I’d thought were forever gone from my life.

“Where did they invent you?” I said when we were resting. What I meant to say was I didn’t know what life was before this. So I quoted Goethe again.

“What do you want your new life to be?” I didn’t know what to say. “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. When you go to Thailand, I’ll come along, and when I give a lecture or a reading, you’ll be there in the last row, just as you were today—and don’t ever disappear again.”

the more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between us—not the other way around.

My problem is discovering what not faking is—and this is difficult and scary for me, because my bearings are always pitched to who I ought to be, not to who I am, to what I should have, not to what I never knew I craved, to life as I found it, not to the life I’ve let myself think was only a dream.

“But more than my friendship with them, you above everyone else made me who I am today. We never had secrets you and I, you know about me, and I know about you. In this I consider myself the luckiest son on earth. You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us. This much I know, young as I am. It’s just that I forget the lesson sometimes.”

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

Do you like November?” “Sometimes, but not always.”

They too, as in your father’s case, cast long shadows on my mother’s family.” “What kind of shadows?” he asked, not quite getting my point. “She bakes wonderful cakes.” He gave a hearty laugh. I was glad he got the joke. “But I know: some shadows never go away,” I added.

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

“We haven’t spoken in ages, and I don’t know that we’re friends, though I’m sure we will always be. He’s always read me extremely well, and I have a feeling that he suspects that if I never write it’s not because I don’t care but because a part of me still does and always will, just as I know he still cares, which is why he too never writes. And knowing this is good enough for me.”

“It belongs to the past,” I said, trying to make amends.

‘It’s not a she,’ I replied. ‘Ah,’ she said. I still remember the last remnants of sunlight on the carpet and against the furniture, the smoky smell of my whiskey, and the cat lying next to me. Sunlight, when I see it in my living room, still reminds me of that conversation. ‘So it’s worse than I thought,’ she said. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because against a woman I still stand a chance, but against who you are, there’s nothing I can do. I cannot change you.’

I never got to know who was the man behind the man I thought my father was.

The person I knew was his second self. I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between.”

“Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out.

I’ll be losing all this, the way I’d lose my small New York rituals, acquired without my knowledge, and that I’d learn to miss when I was elsewhere.