Call Me by Your Name

it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him.

Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To

In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go

I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future.

because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.

with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends. He was okay with losing his prized Mont Blanc pen. “I can buy another one just like it.” He was okay with criticism too. He showed my father a few pages he was proud of having written. My father told him his insights into Heraclitus were brillia

I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.

I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am t

our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one l