emeraldtop

“One more item to log on that checklist of things I’d miss before losing him for good.”

“Oliver, who for so long loomed like a fulcrum on the scale of life, eventually acquired successors who either eclipsed him or reduced him to an early signpost, a minor fork in the road, a small, fiery Mercury on a voyage out to Pluto and beyond.”

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

“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.”

“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 the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have.”

“‘The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing.’”

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”

“Is that what you call it, when we were together? I thought.”

“‘We’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.’”

“They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it- it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead.”

“‘And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.’”

“Maybe every other sorrow I’d known in life suddenly decided to converge on this very one. I had to fight it off. And if he didn’t see, it’s probably because he himself was not immune to it.”

“‘I don’t want to be hurt- not by you.’”

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”

“…it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.”

“We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”

“For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot- and mine too.”

“Twenty years was yesterday and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.

‘I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I remember everything.’”

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi, and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”