Find Me

by André Aciman

Walking around Rome with him is itself a vigil. Everywhere you turn you stumble on memories—your own, someone else’s, the city’s.

“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.”

I wanted to hold her, touch her hand, let a finger drift

along her forehead.

“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.”

This woman was brilliant. And she was beautiful. And she thought along the same twisted, meandering paths I took sometimes.

She liked this as much as I did.

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.”

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.

You see, two lives, two lanes, two time zones, with neither being the right one.

I pick up a suggestion that, despite appearances, living and time are not aligned and have entirely different itineraries.

I

want those who outlive me to extend my life, not just to remember it.”

Another one of those instances where life and time don’t jibe.

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

Heartache can be contracted without symptoms.

“The good part is I don’t think you’ve closed the book or given up looking. For happiness, I mean. I like this about you.”

Say it plainly, Miranda, or say it again.

“Keep holding me, just keep holding me, Sami, and kiss me.” What a woman.

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

her, I’m ready to drop everything. I don’t care where, when, or for how long you want. I don’t care.

I wanted back the me I’d been this morning on the train,

and I wanted the whole thing erased—

“That tomorrow this could blow away. It doesn’t have to.”

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

held her in both arms and kissed her again. I loved knowing about her life. I told her I wanted to know everything.

“I shouldn’t tell you but I must tell you something I’ve never ever told anyone because I never met the one person who wants me as I am or, rather, as I’ve become. And I want you to know it soon, because I’ll be forced to hide it, even from you, if I don’t let it out now. After

want mine down before we make love,” she said.

“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.”

“Promise not to hate me afterward?” “I’ll never hate you.”

because I want the world to know us for who we are together.

“It’s yours, I told you, I don’t want the shadow of anything between us,

and no half measures. I make no promises, but I’ll go all the way with you. Tell me you’ll do the same, tell me now, and don’t take your hand off. If you’re not ready to go all the way—”

“Just so you know, I have never in all my years been so close to anyone. Have you?” “Not ever.”

“This is all I have, this is all I am,”

which was a signal we both understood, for it was, from time immemorial, the gift of one human to another human.

“I’m selfish enough to take everything you’re offering.” “Can you do crazy then?” she asked. “Because I can.”

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.

“You do make me love who I am.”

the more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between

us—not the other way around.

I’d been alone for ever so long, even when I thought I wasn’t alone—and the taste of something as real as blood was far, far better than the taste of just nothing, of wasted and barren years, so many years.

Maybe I can discover parts of Rome or northern Italy through his eyes.

Please be good to her, and be patient.”

“How about tattoos? I want you permanently inscribed on my body.

What I know is that I want our bodies never to be the same again.”

If You could tattoo my soul with her name, You should do it right now.