André Aciman

Our bodies won't have secrets now.

If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.

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 lost and may never have cared for.

Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him "You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.

I wish I knew how to calibrate my kiss the way he did but passion allows us to hide more.

How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they'd learn to put up with because they couldn't quite disown them.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.

There are easy ways to bring back summer in the snowstorm