Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss Page A

(Mullet-rock, thudding from nearby speakers.) I was aware of other people’s hair very near my face, that warmth. Everyone was nodding.
    “And nobody, nobody here anyhow”—Kim drew a little sundial in the air with her finger—“really knew what’s-her-name, the girl, since she wasn’t in our grade. Celine . So anyhow, our sympathies were with you.”
    And nodding went around the circle again.
    Part of reunions is reenacting the whirl of departure over and over. Every few minutes at the bar somebodywould make a sloshy toast and then a dramatic exit: hugs, complicated handshakes, punching email addresses into cell phones. We’d become used to one another again and were saying goodbye again.
    I don’t even know how I’d gotten Kim and her friends discussing the accident. Ten years on, talking about it remained a crackling horror. Probably, just by acting weird, I’d shown myself stained by the blemish of it. Whatever private anxieties we endure are, of course, never really private. Our own dissembling behavior guarantees their eternal, public return.
    “Thanks,” I said. “But it’s just—” And why couldn’t I let it drop? All they’d done was agree to try to buck me up. I wanted to shout: Come on, someone died!
    “Okay!” one of Kim’s friends said, clapping once to ring in a change of subject.
    The nodding petered out. I was aware of people’s hair no longer being near my eyes. And it felt as if the music suddenly got louder again. The moment had lifted its gates from around us.
    “Thank you,” I said, “all of you.”
    “Don’t sweat it.” Kim tilted her thin, savvy face. I never want to talk about this again, her expression said.
    The social-approval me—like the smoke that Kim had earlier waved from my face—seemed to just go poof!
    And now I was the one gushing my way down the bar, handshaking, hugging, giving out my business card, getting it confused with other people’s, so that a few timesthe card I gave out was someone else’s and we had to reexchange. Maybe some friendships had been relit here, but I doubted it. What was said between this group who had been the stars of each other’s lives had been said already, or wouldn’t ever be said.
    The bald dude I’d stood next to in the reunion hall was moping in a corner: hand around a plastic cup, beer slobbering down his knuckles. This guy looked handsome in a diminishing way. Ignore all the scalp and some excess under the chin and he could still have been eighteen. He kept staring at the mirror behind the taps, and that’s where our eyes caught.
    He raised his nose, a quick and wordless What’s up . He was one of the people who’d been remembered by no one, and I thought to give him a backslap, learn his name, but that felt false to me, too. We face-gestured at each other a second time. And next (because life isn’t any more afraid of cliché than we are) I jostled out the door and saw a good friend of Celine’s. This guy had maybe even been her boyfriend: part of Melanie Urquhart’s clique.
    He was talking close with arrogant lips to some people I had barely known even back when. His hair was neat as a haiku. And everything seemed just as it had with Melanie ten years before. The guy showed me a rigid, squint-eyed nod. I paused, my cheeks went warm; I scuttled off to my car. I hated that moment: I was angry at the pause, angry at my legs. I had neither sauntered right over to say hi ( This is behind me ) nor kept moving with my head up ( You think the wrong thing about me, and it doesn’t matter ). Maybe this is as near to time travel as we can know. Not the sort that undoes events, but the situations (the same faces, words, and gestures; the same internal responses) that bring back former selves. Everything between past and present hadn’t disappeared but grown incredibly slim, a wall between now and before that seemed to occupy no space at all. I was the person I had been. This guy was who he had been. Someone all of us