I remember my friends and I reading Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name when it first came out in 2007, enraptured by a gay love story that was sexy without being tragic, that seemed to speak to our mutual desire for a transformative love. Ten years later, I am equally enraptured by Luca Guadagnino's sumptuous adaptation of the novel, as it renders the pangs and pains of first love in a familiar light--but it speaks to me differently now than it did a decade ago.
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I've never been in love, only pretended at it; love always felt like some secret in which I was not invited to share. But I know what it is to feel, and to feel extremely, to want intensely, to desire completely. My emotions are as big and wide as the sky so that I can never get my arms around them, only stand dwarfed in their presence. I know what it is to be like 17-year-old Elio (played beautifully in the movie by Timothee Chalamet): precocious but ignorant to the real things in life, the things that matter; comfortable in solitude but chaffing at the loneliness; unaware of what to do with my body, hurling it wholeheartedly at someone who does. So that every time feels like the first time. Every kiss feels like the last, and must be cherished and held. And every betrayal, every heartbreak, every "love" that ends unrequited feels like a meager death.
Ten years ago that hope for a transformative love was something I could still pretend was possible, but ten years on--with nearly all my friends in serious relationships and me, the odd man out with no intention of finding my way in--it's become a distant memory born out of, I don't know what...maybe just not knowing any better.
How lucky I was then. I turned 32 earlier this month and I made a secret pact with myself not to date or have sex or even consider either option; this would be the year, I told myself, I would reclaim my self-respect, which I felt I had lost or had damaged in the pursuit of that transformative love. I would feel nothing so as not to feel anything, as Elio's father says, consoling his obviously heartbroken son.
"We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything--what a waste!"
It is a waste, I suppose: to close yourself off from a world of emotions, a universe of experiences, in favor of protecting your heart, or what you feel is left of it. But for me, for now, it's necessary; a form of self-preservation, a way to not be emotionally bankrupt, to maybe have as much to offer as I possibly can, should I be given the chance. I just need a year. A year of not feeling so I can allow myself to feel again.
Because I'm not 17, and I'm not 22; and the older you get, the harder it is to heal, let alone to open yourself up to the possibility of love. Maybe I know better now, but that is really knowing nothing at all.
Maybe there's still time to learn.
