Andre Aciman

happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring

so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who’ll relieve it at night?

Do crazy things if you must, they told me all the while, forever prying to unearth the mysterious, telltale signs of heartbreak which, in their clumsy, intrusive, devoted way, both would instantly wish to heal, as if I were a soldier who had strayed into their garden and needed his wound immediately stanched or else he’d die

But all of these hours were strained by fear, as if fear were a brooding specter, or a strange, lost bird trapped in our little town, whose sooty wing flecked every living thing with a shadow that would never wash.

panic felt like hope sometimes and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy, unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it.

They worried for me. I knew they were right to worry. I just hoped they’d never know how far things stood beyond their ordinary worries now.

It told me that if I were no longer transparent and could disguise so much of my life, then I was finally safe from them, and from him—but at what price, and did I want to be so safe from anyone?

The secret was out of my body. So what if he saw. So what if he caught me. So what, so what, so what.

I wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have minded—let him know, let him see, let him pass judgment too if he wants—just don’t tell the world—even if you’re the world for me right now, even if in your eyes stands a horrified, scornful world. That steely look of yours, Oliver, I’d rather die than face it once I’ve told you.

Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher