audrey’s Reviews > Call Me By Your Name > Status Update

This was my favorite Oliver: the one who thought exactly like me.

But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never rewrite 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. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false.

We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.

“I wish I could be with you all,” I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.

His undergrad years, each time he spoke of them, acquired a limelit, incandescent magic, as if they belonged to another life, a life to which I had no access since it already belonged to the past.