I haven’t watched Call Me By Your Name a third time yet but I finished the audiobook so fuck you I’m counting that as a rewatch and yes I know that this isn’t really about a film but I’m putting it on here because I need to share these thoughts. I have no words. I don’t even know how to describe how I’m feeling. I finished the audiobook lying in bed lastnight in the dark and I found myself uncontrollably shaking and crying. I couldn’t breathe. The first time I saw CMBYN knowing very little about it, it completely fucking blew me away. I was so taken back, so overcome with a pain, and emotion, weight that I hadn’t carried before. I felt like a fresh wound had been opened in my chest and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I saw it a second time I was more at peace with it, I knew every beat of the story and I braved myself for the feeling I knew would wash over me again when it finished. After seeing it twice I was unbearably curious to read the book because I was just dying to know how different it was or if the book Elio and Oliver matched the film Elio and Oliver. To be honest the main thing that attracted me to the audiobook initially was just that Armie Hammer narrates it becaus um.... a MAN. And yes while his voice is the most beautifully soft and smooth and soothing and seductive thing I’ve ever heard, it was absolutely nothing compared to the words he was reading. I am not being dramatic when I say I never knew a piece of writing, of literature, could be so utterly and completely unimaginably beautiful in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I never knew words on a page could hold that much power. I felt them deep in my core. I know right now that I will carry Elio with me wherever I go. He’s a part of me now and I can’t let him go. By the time I finished the book Elio and I were one, I was in his head, I had heard his every deepest thought, I had seen parts of him that were so private. It’s so strange because I feel like I had such a personal relationship with him and with his story, it felt like a secret between the two of us and only I had heard it. It’s so strange to me to think of the countless others all over the world who have also gone on the same journey with Elio. Do they still think about him? Is he as utterly visceral and real to them as he has been to me? When listening to this audiobook every single word one after the next took everything out of me, hit me like a punch to the gut. The things that hadn’t been in the film and were new to me hit me hard but surprisingly, the things that WERE in the film hit me even harder. While I still adore the film with every fiber of my being, there is no way it could ever be on the transcendent level of the book. Every single beat, every inch of Elio’s psyche. Every fleeting thought, every stare, every touch. To put it quite frankly it was just.....SO MUCH. It was heavy. Every sentence, every chapter was so stuffed and dense with pain and power, I found I had to listen to it a little bit at a time. Anyways I would fucking die for this book and I will never be the same. My favorite book, NO, my favorite piece of literature I’ve ever read in my life. I would also fucking die for this film. 

(this probably made NO sense lmao it’s just me rambling)