Call me by your name - André Aciman (p234)

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How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn't go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshakem a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later!?

The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me--too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we've lost and may never have cared for.

Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he'd made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn't possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn't there to witness and wouldn't know the first thing about. I wasn't there when he acquired them, wasn't there when he'd given up. Or was it much, such simplier? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn't want anything to be alive either.

All these years, whenever I thought of him, I'd think either of B. or of last days in Rome, the whole thing leading up to two scenes: the balcony with its attendant agonies and via Santa Maria dell'Anima, where he'd pushed me against the old wall and kissed me and in the end let me put one leg around his. Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under tge abcient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have. I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was seperated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. The places where he'd lived also felt inanimate, and as soon as I tried thinking of them, they too would float and drift away, no less unreal and spectral. Now, it turned out, not only were New England towns very much alive, but so was he. I could easily have thrust myself on him years ago, married or unmarried--unless it was I who, despite all appearances, had all along been unreal and spectral myself.

Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B.? Yes, both our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we'd finally meet and scale our way back to the Piave memorial.

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Remember it? I once wondered when someone and I would be twenty years later. But I also knew at that time things would soon become long lost memories just in less than two years. I was right as I'd known. In comparison to what Oliver was for/to Elio, that man was nothing to me. He was just there when I suddenly had that question about future itself and he was just an object of the subject. But it was enough for me to have a small taste of what the matter itself really means to anyone who looks back to the past and recognizes how his life become with or without that other important part of himself.

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