Find Me

by André Aciman

Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve al...

Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. 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. What do I want? Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life?

I need to go back, Micol. Why? Because my life stopped there. Because I never really left. Because the rest of me here has been like the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across the Atlantic in that wonderful house by the sea. I’ve been away for far too long.

Everything was a screen, and life itself was a diversion. What mattered now was unlived.

You’ve been disloyal. To what, to whom? To yourself.

I was forty-four years old. I was already dead—and yet too young, too young to die.

One person, one name—he knows, I thought. Right now, he knows, he still knows. Find me, he says. I will, Oliver, I will, I say. Or has he forgotten?

You know I’ll always wait up, even if you get here at four a.m. All these years, I’ve waited up, do you think I won’t wait up a few more hours now? Waiting up is what we’ve done all our lives, waiting up allows me to stand here remembering Bach’s music playing at my end of our planet and letting my thoughts go out to you, for all I want is to think of you, and sometimes I don’t know who’s the one thinking, you or I.

If he asks how long I’m staying, I’ll tell him the truth. If he asks where I plan to sleep, I’ll tell him the truth. If he asks. But he won’t ask. He won’t have to. He knows.

We were in the same house where it had all started—but were we the same?

“Time,” he replied. As always, this was all he said. Did he need time, I asked, almost ready to move far away from him on our bed. No, he replied. It took me a while to understand that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.

This underscored so many things we hadn’t said, or hadn’t had time to say, or couldn’t find the words to say, yet here it was, like a final chord resolving an unfinished melodic air.

So much time, so many years, and all the lives we’d touched and left behind, as though they could just as easily have never happened, though happen they did—time, as he’d said before we hugged and went to sleep so late that night, time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

don’t know what seized me, but after I poured his coffee, I lowered my voice and almost kissed his earlobe. “You’re never going back,” I whispered. “Tell me you’re not leaving.”

Quietly, he grabbed my arm and pulled me down to my seat at the head of the table. “I’m not leaving. Stop thinking like that.”

I wanted to tell him about what had happened twenty years before, the good, the bad, the v...

“I’ve had to sever many ties and burn bridges I know I’ll pay dearly for, but I don’t want to look back. I’ve had Micol, you’ve had Michel, just as I’ve loved a young Elio and you a younger me. They’ve made us who we are. Let’s not pretend they never existed, but I don’t want to look back.”

But Oliver told me something I will never forget: that on the sixteenth of November each year—my birthday—though married and the father of two sons, he would take time out to remember the Poseidonian in himself and to consider what life would have been had we stayed together.

Over the years he had found his own ritual spot not far from his office, overlooking a lake where he would take a few moments on that day to think of our unlived life, his with mine.

the lure of bygone days had never left him, that he had forgotten nothing and didn’t want to forget,

even if he couldn’t write or call to see whether I too had forgotten nothing, still, he knew that though neither of us sought out the other it was only because we had never really parted and that, regardless of where we were, who we were with, and whatever stood in our way, all he needed when the time was right was simply to come and find me.