Old Post: "Departure Lounge"

Yeti Warlord's Note:  Originally posted 13 June 2008.  Nest of Wonders occasionally present the very best of my old blong for your reading enjoyment.  Not a word has been altered.  Rest in peace, Jeanne.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.

--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, ch. 1

Sunday I leave Lincoln, essentially for good.

I arrived here, temporarily, some time in June 1992, to spend the summer with my father.  I returned to New York to enter 9th grade, but remained only a few days.  By August 22, 1992, I came back to Lincoln, enrolled in Park Middle School, and cast my fortunes here.  I was 14, and all of this was out of my hands.

I have made and lost many friends, lovers, teachers.  I have seen many leave, to several states and continents, and now I depart to be among them.  Sadly I have seen too many die.  Tragically, seemingly inexplicably, Jeanne McClymont is now among them.

While we were not at all close in the last few years, I owe it to her to remember her as a friend to me in one of the darkest times in my life, a period I remember mainly with sorrow and fierce pangs of regret.  She eventually got me involved in the ACLU and helped me fill out a FAFSA in 2005.  Her insistence that I do the thing and the time she invested in seeing me through it was some of the last time we spent together, to my shame.  It was one of the important intersections in finding my way back to my Will.

I have now no opportunity to repay her, and will have to salve my conscience by remembering her commitment to my betterment whenever I encounter someone in similar straits.

Her death will be for me a terrible reminder of the risk of leaving things undone, thanks unsaid, how only to our own peril forget the words of the Allfather:  "Be not the first to fail a friendship."

Especially now, in the same moon as I head West to seek new fortunes; I will endeavour to make up my failings if I can, and renew my commitment to Love and Truth.