#( for a passing mention but i'm trying hard to be diligent abt tagging! )

[moralityblurred]

here i am emotionally compromised again. i’ve been reading tweak for more insight on nic and just. wow. literally started reading it yesterday afternoon and i’m already over halfway through it. it’s a little scary how much i can relate to his ways of thinking. i’m trying NOT to overthink about that.

and then i went to go change my discord status as i do every morning and i was sifting through cmbyn quotes and god, every time i get to quotes from when elio visits oliver at his university fifteen years later and they end up having a drink at elio’s hotel...i’m just struck dumb with the ACHE of that meeting. of course, we don’t see oliver’s side of things and he seems cool and collected, congenial, offering to introduce elio to his family. but can he really be that callous to everything going through elio’s mind? no -- because he hesitates before accepting elio’s invite to the hotel. “i said a drink, not a fuck.” oliver knows. he knows himself, remember? he knows elio. he knows he still feels something for elio, knows he wants to fall in bed with him, even if he ultimately decides to be good to his wife, he WANTS to.

and then when oliver visits elio at the villa again after the professor dies. the whole ‘you’re the only person i want to say goodbye to in this world.’ makes me cry every time. i’m crying right now. they’ve barely spoken for twenty years, seen each other once, and yet elio is still full of this feeling that oliver is one of the most important parts of his life. even though he talks about how his life isn’t segmented so much by oliver’s summer, but by other lovers that came after him.( 'Many helped me part life into Before X and After X segments, many brought joy and sorrow, many threw my life off course, while others made no difference whatsoever, so that Oliver, who for so long had loomed like a fulcrum on the scale of life, eventually acquired successors who either eclipsed him or reduced him to an early milepost, a minor fork in the road, a small, fiery Mercury on a voyage out to Pluto and beyond.’ ) it’s still super clear that oliver is important to him. he can’t feel nothing. he both wants to feel nothing and to be thrown right back into every feeling of that summer when ‘he became me and i became him in bed so many years ago.’

i can’t even describe the feeling that overcomes me about this. it’s beautiful that those feelings are still there, even after all these years, even after oliver has married and made a family, even after elio has moved on with his life too & is a successful concert pianist. it’s also INCREDIBLY sad and tragic that circumstances kept these two deeply in love people apart. they could have shared so. many. things. together. it rips me apart inside. i can’t breathe. i want the connection that oliver and elio have, but the thought of losing something so goddamn precious is TERRIFYING.

inevitably i start thinking about find me, too, and i have to wonder about the final section of the book where oliver & elio are traveling together, and then there’s miranda and little oliver at the villa. when i read more carefully, i could see how it was written that oliver leaving his wife is just a fantasy he has, and maybe it doesn’t actually happen. maybe it just plays out in his head. which would mean his return to italy, to ELIO, never happens. which means he never gets to meet little oliver. and the last chapter is just another fantasy, except how could he imagine someone he hasn’t met or heard about? i have to hope that the last section of the book isn’t just a dream sequence. i have to hope that these two deeply-emotional human beings don’t have to spend the rest of their lives apart from one another, maybe speaking infrequently, maybe visiting each other here & there, but never getting to be together the way they should be. because thinking otherwise feels like it will break me.

it shouldn’t matter -- they’re just fictional characters, but i think what hurts the most is how REAL it feels. because this happens to people all the time -- falling in love with someone only to lose them, for whatever reason. i’m just super fucked up about it.