You May Not Want To Feel Anything, But You Will

"To make yourself feel nothing, so as not to feel anything... What a waste."

Call Me by Your Name2017

The first time I saw Call Me By Your Name, I thought I would never recover. With that line, the movie settled somewhere under my ribcage, cracked me open, and exposed a part of myself that, until that very moment, I hadn't known existed.

The film is an achingly intimate love story told in the spaces between words. Expressed not through what is said, but what is left out.

In every scene except for one. And it's my favourite of all.

It changed my life twice.

Once on first viewing, and again years later, when I found myself riding my own bicycle through a different town in Northern Italy, grappling with my own life-changing summer.

I.

Unassuming on the surface, a simple scene where two men sit next to each other on a couch unravels the pain and the beauty of love. It encapsulates everything that Call Me By Your Name is, hones it to a point, and drives it through the heart.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Sami is a huge part of why this scene works so well. Throughout the film, Oliver and Elio's relationship has been a secret, even if it's not the best kept one. Elio is just coming into his sexuality, but he isnt out yet. He doesn't have to be. Here we learn that his summer love affair has actually been happening under Sami's safe and watchful gaze, albeit from a respectful distance. Stuhlbarg's soft-spoken and gentle presence is felt throughout the film, but in this scene the love that he has for his son rises to the surface. Every word is brimming with emotion, everything that he has wanted to tell Elio, but has kept to himself out of respect.

"You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you," he says. He doesn't demand answers from Elio. He doesn't push. He simply extends a hand, lifting the burden of revelation from his shoulders.

His words are simple, but calculated. In a few minutes, he communicates with grace and clarity three things that every child wants to hear from their parent, especially those of us who have felt that we have had to keep a part of ourselves secret:

I'm here for you

I accept you

I love you

Throughout the film, I felt like I was holding my breath. Anxiety, frustration, longing, fear, uncertainty-- they all buzzed below the surface of the screen as Elio and Oliver orbited each other, drawn inevitably closer and closer together. In this scene, for the first time, I get to exhale.

For Elio, these words provide comfort in heartbreak and loss, but for me, they meant something completely different. I wasn't heartbroken like he was, but I was depressed.

When I first watched it, this scene gave me something that I desperately needed. I was 15, and I didn't know how to handle all of the big emotions that were swirling around my head, holding me down. I didn't even know why I was sad, much less how to fix it. At the time, it felt like the dark cloud would never lift from my head. Sami's words of comfort and resilience stood in for the help that I was far too afraid to ask for. Not that different from his son.

To be seen is a great gift, and after all this time, Elio is able to express himself candidly and without fear. Sami takes care to let him do so on his own terms, but he can finally let go of his insecurity and the fear of rejection.

"I think he was better than me."

He collapses towards his father as he says it, closing the distance between them. As so many teenagers do, he wants comfort, but not to admit that he needs it.

Elio isn't the kind to come right out with his feelings, preferring to move in the shadows between clever double entendre and loaded words. Until now, he thought that only Oliver had the power to see through him. But in a quiet moment between a father and a son, Sami shows him that real love and recognition doesn't always have to be romantic.

"Right now you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you never wanted to feel anything. But feel something you obviously did."

I remember finishing the movie, drying my eyes, and wishing more than anything that I could experience a tiny bit of what Call Me By Your Name made me feel in real life. Not the romance necessarily, but the warm safety of the summer it occupies. It felt impossible then; a pipe dream.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

II.

Five years later, my pipe dream had become a reality. I felt the heat of the sun and my clothes sticking to the back of my neck. I was cycling along beside my friend, over cobbled bridges and through piazas, as he showed me the small Italian town he had grown up in.

It was incredibly bittersweet. For weeks, I'd been journeying around Europe, nearing the end of my semester abroad. By that point, I'd been away from home for seven months. I was finally getting to have the adventures that I'd always dreamed of, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't incredibly difficult at times. When I finally made it to Italy, my friend invited me to stay at his family home with his parents.

I'm not sure if it was the home cooked meals, or their dog curled up at my feet. Maybe it was discussing music with his dad or the way his mom worried over my sunscreen application and always made sure that I had enough to eat. After so long traveling on my own, those few days with them broke my heart and put me back together again all at once. The love that they showed me made me want more than anything to go home, but I also never wanted it to end.

Maybe it was the setting, but I couldn't help but think of Sami and Elio in those moments. Especially this line:

"Right now there's sorrow. Pain. Don't kill it. And with it the joy you felt."

Once again, I found a second meaning in his words. Though I wasn't grieving a relationship, I was grieving, in my own way. Grieving the end of one of the happiest periods in my life. One where I set out on my own, completely separated from everything that had defined me before, and for the first time in my life started to feel like a person entirely "me." As cliche as it is, my time abroad had changed me forever, and now it was ending.

Again I found comfort in Sami's words. I was proud that I had come so far from who I had been. I'd made it out the other side of sadness before. I knew I could do it again. All it really meant was that I was growing.

When I watch it now, I see the scene through two sets of eyes, and though they are very different people, they are both me. I'm glad that I took Sami's advice and didn't try to "cure" myself of any of difficult feelings. I would lose some intangible part of myself that it has taken me years to grow into. Without beauty there can be no pain, without joy there can be no sorrow. And though I may be stretching the meaning from its original context, that's something that I needed reaffirmed.

Then. And now.