Find Me

by André Aciman

She looked at me and smiled. “Not so fast.” She prods, then drills right through you.

son even without a mobile phone call barging in. Saved by the phone, silenced by the phone, shunted by the phone.

could see her whetting some well-honed words with which to cut down

“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.”

Perhaps I preferred to doubt rather than know.

“And yet, I’m not difficult. I’m actually a good person, just a bit opinionated. But it’s only a front. I put up with everyone and everything. At least for a while. Then one day it just hits me: I don’t want to be with this guy, don’t want him near me, need to get away.

something frail and genuine, perhaps even vulnerable. No wonder the men in her life closed in on her. They knew what they were losing the moment she turned her eyes away.

“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.”

“So, was your marriage the wrong ferryboat?”

Aren’t you like me?” This too moved me. “Maybe.”

She was showing her other side, the one that sizes people up and makes hasty indictments, then shuts them off and never lets them back in except when she weakens, only to hold it against them that she did.

Death is God’s great blunder, and sunset and dawn are how he blushes for shame and asks our forgiveness each and every day.

“So this is what you put between you and life—ten thousand books?”

She reminded me of someone who storms into your life, just as she’d done in her father’s living room, and right away fluffs your pillows, tears open the windows, straightens two old paintings you’ve stopped seeing though they’d never budged from your mantelpiece for years, and with a deft foot flattens the ripples on an ancient rug, only to remind you, once she’s added flowers to a vase that’s been standing empty for ever so long that, in case you were still struggling to downplay her presence, you wouldn’t dare ask for more than a week, a day, an hour of this.

“I just knew.” “I just knew,” I repeated. I loved this. I think we both did.

“My friends would find this hysterical and think, Miranda’s lost her mind.” “I know. But do you want to?” “Yes.”

“It takes me a while to get used to someone. Maybe nerves, though I don’t feel nervous with you—which makes me plenty nervous in itself. I don’t want to be nervous.”

For a moment I’d meant to tell her, I’m ready to drop everything. I don’t care where, when, or for how long you want. I don’t care.

“You’re just scared.” “Of what, though?” “That tomorrow this could blow away. It doesn’t have to.”

“The world according to you and me. Are we spending the rest of our lives in a cocoon? Can we be this foolish?”

“She’s not all she’s cracked up to be, you know. She’s impulsive, and there’s always a tempest brewing inside her head, but she is more delicate than the most friable china. Please be good to her, and be patient.”

“Is this going too fast for you?” “I love that it is. Will it hurt?”

Fucking insane, jesus christ

If I could open your body and slip into it and sew you back from the inside, I would do it, so I could cradle your quiet dreams and let you dream mine. I’d be the rib that hasn’t become me yet, happy to hang on and, as you said, see the world with your eyes, not mine, and hear you echo my thoughts and think they’re yours.”

It was a tense and awkward moment, partly because he had broached a subject that felt totally premature and too close to what we were cautiously sidestepping, crossing t’s that weren’t even written out yet and should have remained silent, at least for a while longer.

you’d meet me.” “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 both smiled. It was moments of sudden and radiant intimacy like these that made me want to shout, It’s been years since I’ve been like this with anyone.

he never really died for me. He’s just absent. Sometimes it’s almost as though he might change his mind and slip in through a back door somewhere.

“You could just be the dearest person I’ve ever known. Which also means you could hurt me, devastate me actually.

‘Find someone,’ he said.

“Because the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he’s afraid of asking, because he thinks you’ll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult. I’m shy, I’m scared, and I’m old.”

Was there anyone who would send me a cadenza one day and say, I am gone, but please find me, play for me?

Or perhaps what he might have meant was this: If the music doesn’t change you, dear friend, it should at least remind you of something profoundly yours that you’ve probably lost track of but that actually never went away and still answers when beckoned by the right notes, like a spirit gently roused from a prolonged slumber with the right touch of a finger and the right silence between the notes.

I was pleased, thrilled, and crushed.

Isn't that how it always is?

“Everything comes in layers here,”

One seldom recovers.