Find Me

Some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.

It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.

As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late.

..time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.

Each of us is like a moon that shows only a few facets to earth, but never its full sphere. Most of us never meet those who'll understand our full rounded self. I show people only that sliver of me I think they'll grasp.

Is it that you don’t like people, or that you just grow tired of them and can’t for the life of you remember why you ever found them interesting?

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 always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we've buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. 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.

Maybe what you need is less pride and more courage. Pride is the nickname we give fear.

Aren't those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we've given up hoping they could.

He knew that if 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.

Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.

As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others

I never told you that, Dad, but I was drunk out of my mind one night, I had just vomited in front of the statue of the Pasquino and couldn't have been more dazed in my life yet here as I leaned against this very wall, I knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me. And now, ten years later, when I look at this wall under this old streetlamp, I am back with him and I swear to you, nothing has changed. In thirty, forty, fifty years I will feel no differently. I have met many women and more men in my life, but what is watermarked on this very wall overshadows everyone I've known. When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I'd be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back." "What would it say?" asked Miranda, totally taken in by the thought of Elio and the wall. "What would it say? Simple: 'Look for me, find me.'" "And what do you say?" "I say the same thing. 'Look for me, find me.' And we were both happy. Now you know.

I don’t know if I’m the type who even likes people, much less falls in love with them.

To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It’s as if time was all wrong and the wife’s life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.

So if it wasn’t fate, what brought you to the concert tonight?” . . . . ..he said, “You.” “Me?” He nodded. “Yes, you.” “But you didn’t know you’d meet me.” “A meaningless detail. Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.

Love is easy,” I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both.

Some of us never jumped to the next level. We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started.

It belongs to the past,” I said, trying to make amends. “Nothing belongs to the past.

You die and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You're extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn't drop ashes.

You could just be the dearest person I’ve ever known. Which also means you could hurt me, devastate me actually.

If I could, I would kiss your voice.

Perhaps he'd seen that sometimes it's best to stop things when they're perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.

Men!" she finally said, as though that one word summed up all the shortcomings most women are willing to overlook and learn to put up with and ultimately forgive in the men they hope to love for the rest of their lives even when they know they won't

The more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between us, not the other way around.

You’re so good at finding paradoxes, and once you’ve fished one out from your bag of easy notions you think you’ve got your answer. But a paradox is never an answer, it’s just a fractured truth, a wisp of meaning without legs.

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a god, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished.