habits, the smoking and the drawing, and he said sometimes when youâre in an accident like mine, other parts of your brain compensate for the ones that have been damaged.
Donât worry,
he said.
Everything will be back to normal soon enough, and if notâwell, artistic talent isnât such a bad thing, is it, and Iâll just write you a prescription for Wellbutrin.
And then he laughed, which I did not appreciate.
The next session we had, I told him about the sense that my lifeâs on hold, that it seems like thereâs nothing to it. He said that was logical, that until my memories came back, it was natural that Iâd be âa bit at sea.â This was not what I meant, exactly. Itâs not that I donât have things to do from one day to the next, or people to do them with. Itâs that all of this stuff seems to add up to nothing. The sense of happiness I had when I was climbing, the rush of love for the dark-haired woman and the little boy, those things have weight. Compared with them, my day-to-day life seems meaningless, just a bunch of hours strung together.
When I related all this to Dr. Green, he nodded his head. âHmmm,â he said. âYouâre not working right now, are you?â I told him that I wasnât, that I wonât be teaching again until the fall. His brilliant conclusion was that my life lacks structureâthat if I were in a classroom, Iâd feel a lot more inspired. He recommended that I give myself some time.
For all I know, he could be right. But when I think about getting up in front of a classroom full of high school students and talking to them about the American political system, I donât feel a thrill of excitement. What I feel, instead, is dread. I donât know if this is because I have no actual memories of teaching or planning a curriculum. I guess it could be plain old stage fright. The thing is, itâs not working with kids that turns me off, itâs the settingâthe confines of a classroom, standing up in front of a group of students day after endless day, year after year. When I think about it too hard, I want to flee for the nearest exit as fast as my legs will take me.
Iâve done my best to make sense out of this, poking around my life to see if I was planning to switch careers anytime soon. I asked Grace, and she said I was good at my job, that I had no plans to do anything else. I asked Taylor, and he said no, man, you liked it because you got the summers off and you could hang out at the beach. Then I asked Jack, and he gave me a blank stare. Itâs a living, he said. Youâre not supposed to love it. You do what you gotta do. The latter seemed like such a grim assessment, I resolved to never bring up the subject again. Maybe Iâve had a personality reassignment or something.
I could handle all of this, I think, if it werenât for the dreams. Last week, in an effort to get a grip, I drove out to Climb On!, an indoor rock climbing gym located in Wilmingtonâs outer reaches. I thought that maybe something there would resonate with me, that perhaps I had a secret life as a mountain climber and thatâs why teaching social studies seemed tame in comparisonâbut that didnât happen. I looked at the walls covered in multicolored holds, the dudes climbing upside down in what the front desk person told me was called the Cave, and shuddered. Not only was none of it familiar, but when I stepped into a harness and started making my way up one of the routes, I got vertiginously dizzy. By the end of my sojourn to Climb On!, I learned yet another new thing about myself: I do not care for heights. Not at all.
So much for my secret identity theory. Iâm back to pissing Grace off, drinking too much, and wandering around like one of Oliver Sacksâs prime case studies. In my spare time, I sit and picture the dark-haired woman, trying to figure out why her face calls up such strong
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