Find Me

by André Aciman

living and time are not aligned and have entirely different itineraries.

“What these men have to offer I already have. And everything they want they don’t deserve, or I may not have in me to give.

“It’s not funny, it’s just that you weren’t even born when I used to live here.”

God ew lol

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

Life was like a waiting room at a doctor’s office and my turn never came.”

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.”

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. 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. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar.

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.

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

I knew, as he must have known, that what is so dreadful about farewells and departures is the near certainty that we’ll never see each other again. 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.

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.

time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.