Find Me

by André Aciman

Sometimes I’m blamed for being too open, too forward, and then for being too guarded and withdrawn.”

“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.”

“Everything went so fast and felt so natural, that neither saw the need to discuss the matter with our partners or give them a second thought. We simply let go all our inhibitions. In those days we still had inhibitions.”

“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.

I hate the drawn-out process of packing up and moving out and those unavoidable postmortems that turn into teary-eyed pleas to stay together; above all I hate the lingering pretense of an attachment after we don’t even want to be touched by someone we no longer recall wanting to sleep with.

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. I fight this feeling. But as soon as a man senses this, he’ll hound me with despairing puppy eyes. Once I spot that look, pfffff, I’m gone and immediately find someone else.

She made intimacy want to happen, made it easy, as if you’d always had it in you to give, and were craving to share it but realized you’d never find it in yourself unless it was with her.

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.

“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.”

Could she tell that wanting to hold her both stirred and dismayed me, because I knew there was no room for me in her world?

“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.

Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”

Closure, if it exists at all, is either for the afterlife or for those who stay behind.

We pass along our shadow selves and entrust what we’ve learned, lived, and known to afterpeople.

“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. That’s the sad part.”

But a paradox is never an answer, it’s just a fractured truth, a wisp of meaning without legs.

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. You may not even know you’re suffering from it.

“I think the love I once had has run its course. What remains is just placebo love, easy to mistake for real love.

Resentment because I had given her my trust, and there was no taking trust back. She had crushed it and shot it down the chute without giving my trust or me another thought. I wanted back the me I’d been this morning on the train, and I wanted the whole thing erased—none of it had happened. Ee-jit. Of course it hadn’t.

After this, I kept thinking, we’ll turn off the lights, lock the doors, pull down the blinds, and learn never to hope again. Not in this lifetime.

In the end, I stopped waiting, because I stopped believing that you’d stray into my life because I no longer trusted you existed.

I want to scrape off the rust, start here again, and redo the whole thing with you.

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

Lobbies never age. We don’t either, I thought. Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.

After this secret, I have nothing to hide. Don’t you have a secret like that, a secret that is so burdensome that it becomes a wall that can’t be taken down?

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

What baffled me most, when I remembered the years of my life, was the distance we travel to lock our doors after scarcely leaving them ajar on our very first night with a stranger.

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

tell her that what happened between us, if it lasted twenty-four hours, was worth the wait of untold light-years that came before evolution even started, and are to follow after our dust is no longer even dust, until that day in a quadrillion years on some other planet in some distant constellation a Sami and Miranda will happen again. I wish them my very best.

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. You’re oxygen to me, and I’ve been living off methane.”

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

I’ve taught you how to earmark moments where time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love.

But above all it was always your courage I envied, how you trusted your love for music and later your love for Oliver.”

I knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me.

When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I’d be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back.”

“I’ve never even had the courage to call him, to write to him, much less to visit him. All I can do when I’m alone is whisper his name in the dark. But then I laugh at myself. I just pray I’ll never whisper it when I’m with someone else.”

His was a broad, endearing, and sudden smile that caught you off guard, but given the irony underscoring the word life, there was little mirth in it.

He turned but then looked at me once more, and I felt a sudden urge to hurl myself against him and put my arms around his upper waist right under his jacket.

Again the warm, fetching smile, a blend of wisdom, irony, and just a dab of sadness to remind me that there was nothing light about this gentle, possibly unhappy man.

He didn’t say anything; he simply nodded. But his wasn’t a nod of affirmation, meaning yes; it was the pensive, distracted, wistful nod of someone who normally chooses not to believe a word he’s heard.

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

“And you know that I’m almost twice your age.” This was when I blushed. 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.

The silence that suddenly hovered between us did not displease him, and he nodded again, that same wistful and reflective nod, followed by a very mild shaking of the head, not of negation but of something bordering on disbelief and speechless wonderment at the way life simply plays along sometimes.