Read Online Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss - Free Book Online

Celine’s parents being out there, someplace, just seething, hating me, blaming me for their daughter’s death, made me just … made me just …
    How could I put words to the thick, gloomy thing that covered my mind—this nullity that even all these yearslater, when I call up that airport confession, makes it all play a little extra darkly in my brain’s theater? This was the same pain, the same whole-soul despair, that got me thinking—mainly theoretically, in an informal way—about committing suicide.
    I felt in contact with the Zilkes’ hate, a long-distance communication between us, like a dispatch sent over telephone wire: a future, a jinx, message received. This silent communication with the Zilkes felt like the truest words anyone had said to me since the accident. The only unmuffled thing—what I’d waited to hear the whole time. You did this. You alone are responsible .
    I didn’t cry when talking about this to Jim. I just felt very, very sad. Tears came quickly and readily at movies—even the dumbest movies—and at commercials. (Even the most obvious: family gatherings, a new mayonnaise sampled at an outdoor table, or an affordable phone service—and I found myself reaching for the Kleenex. A man and woman taking each other’s arms after leaving an especially understanding slow-motion bank, walking down a moody, populated street with smiles on their faces, and I was a puddle.) But I never cried about things in my own life. They seemed too small. And I never cried about Celine.
    Jim listened carefully as I chattered on about the Zilkes. Holiday passengers circulated around, their belongings on stands and wheels: the flustered, the ardent, the frowning, the greeters and the greeted, the intersections of lives and plans at an airport.
    “What dicks they are,” Jim said.
    My thought was— no! “I think her parents just don’t have any idea what to do,” I said. How would he act in their place?
    Jim shook his head no. He put his hand on my biceps; I could feel the fingers through the wool. College was teaching all of us not to be so shy about touching, that contact was what adults did more of than children.
    “Darin, dude, everyone knows how you feel. Don’t beat yourself up. Her parents are already willing to beat you up for you,” he said. “Those dicks.”
    I gave a small, gutless laugh and changed the subject. I very badly wanted to stand up for the Zilkes but didn’t even try.
    And then I was twenty and not talking about it at all, not even to people like Jim. That year I remember as one peeled of emotion. I didn’t identify with the Zilkes’ anger anymore. I really wasn’t feeling at all, just finishing classes, closing books and subjects forever.
    I belonged to no support groups, but still I somehow fell into the serenity now traps of rationalization and cop-out. It was easy to do. I had, of course, that journal entry. I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody’s prettymuch unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.
    At twenty-one I was studying in London, where avoidance was even easier. An ocean between me and the person who had done this.
    Turning up a collar to Leicester Square fog, swigging one-pound lagers in fireplace pubs—these were just a very few of the uncountable experiences that Celine would never have. Every time I realized this (which was often) it came as a numbness that seemed to match the London weather: as though Celine was merely some girl I’d vaguely known in high school with very bad luck. I remember walking alone down British streets that directed everyone to Look Right, Look Left. This simple pavement advisory struck me, for pretty obvious reasons, as buzzing with whole realms of meaning.
    The lawsuit still loomed over me. But I had Celine’s journal