Half a Life: A Memoir Read Online Free

the rites of conversation again.
    “I feel pretty good?” Somehow I didn’t let the tears fall. “Not bad?” My voice wasn’t even really a sniveling whisper.
    So I tried to give this a chance. I tried—after the Porsche edged onto the shoulder, stopping next to a sweep of West Shore Road. The Footloose soundtrack had forged ahead: first to “Almost Paradise (Love Theme from Footloose ),” now Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.” After a moment of tiptoeing around the mood, the Shrink twisted the volume all the way down. We sat together in soft ticking silence. I tried to chuck my guilt into the landscape’s calm. I tried. And it was weird to be back here. Only days later, and it was already just a spot. A spot with geese and a spear of light.
    Your muscles can tense with hope. I looked around for somewhere I could entrust with all this emotion: the khaki stripe of sand a little way off; the clean bend of street that (in a guess) I’d picked as the exact place where the accident had happened; all the vast and true stuff that seems to be nearly revealed, but isn’t, when you take the time to admire nature—that is in fact never revealed.
    But a sickly paste of anxiety covered everything. I fearedthat by giving my feeling over to someone else’s idea of what I should be feeling, I’d lose it. Years later, at college, I would read a Hemingway story about a young man home from a war, and the words would be so right I’d see that Porsche and that median strip and my stomach would turn heavy:
Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it …
His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of …
Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.
    Over the Shrink’s Porsche clouds were tapping together, and the sky turned dismal again. The occasional car passed to slide its lights over the road. I had a fresh, healthy thought: It was too soon for me to gain anything meaningful from being here.
    The Shrink turned a key, and his car snorted awake. “This,” he said, “was a help, right—this drive?”
    I lied and I nodded: It sure had been.
    His pink face (which for all I know wasn’t nearly as vulgar as I still need to see it) eased into the smile he’d wantedto wear all along. And the Porsche skimmed back onto what you might call the traffic portion of the street.
    “I knew it, Darin. It’s just a place. The accident’s just something that happened. This happened to both of you.”
    Still, the Shrink needed to get back at me for having doubted him. He did this, however, with the gentlest touch. “Listen, you probably don’t understand this yet, but therapy,” he said, “is a process, okay?” He turned up the music again. “You have to listen to your therapist.”
    It would be ten years before I’d try therapy again.

That Tuesday or Wednesday, there had been a school-wide memorial assembly: Celine’s teachers, friends, and coaches giving tributes to her, the “girl who has been so cruelly taken from us.” I hadn’t had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all.
    Friends told me that, before the end of the assembly, a teacher stood from the crowd. This was a guy I barely knew and didn’t very much like. He walked straight to the microphone. It was a surprise; the teacher hadn’t been designated to speak.
    “Along with the sadness,” he said, taking the mic from the principal, “I know there’s a lot of anger here.” This teacher wasn’t a hippie, but