Find Me

by André Aciman

“I don’t know if I’m the type who even likes people, much less falls in love with them.” I could just see it in the two of them: the same embittered, impassive, injured hearts. “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.”

Wild, untamed boots, as though they’d been dragged on craggy treks and acquired an aged, weatherworn look, which meant she trusted them. She liked her things worn and broken in. She liked comfort.

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.”

“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.”

None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. 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.

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

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

“Each of us is like a moon that shows only a few facets to earth, but never its full sphere. Most of us never meet those who’ll understand our full rounded self. I show people only that sliver of me I think they’ll grasp. I show others other slices. But there’s always a facet of darkness I keep to myself.”

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

“Maybe what you need is less pride and more courage. Pride is the nickname we give fear. You were afraid of nothing once. What happened?”

“I don’t always walk in my father’s footsteps, but his shadow is difficult to avoid. I am full of contradictions.”

Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. 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.

No one ever went bankrupt borrowing someone else’s pleasure.

“And some of our fondest desires end up meaning more to us unrealized than tested—don’t you think?”