On the eve of Tuesday, November twenty-third,
nineteen seventy-six, I thought of the
first night of my involuntary exile, on the
narrow, uncomfortable bed of my exile, as
Thursday, September Ninth bled over the stabbing
stroke of midnight into Friday, the Tenth. In
abject silence I wept, with my hand over my
mouth to effect silence; and my eyes leaking more tears
than I had shed over several previous. The
contour of my randomly assigned roommate's body,
prone in the other bed, raucously snored. In less
than seventy-two hours, he would declare to me on the
staircase to the Dining Hall that we should never be
friends of any social degree, and
we have not been for nearly half a century.
I wept, for the separation from BlueShift and our community---
local channel twenty-two on the c.b.
Starward-Led
This felt like a dolorous perversity, and
upon the Love I felt for BlueShift it was a ludicrous blasphemy,
imposed by parental authoriity that
glowed like lethal radiation from each building of the University
campus. Yet, when, still sleepless, I watched Friday morning's dawn
break (as the transition had, I thoght, already broken me),
I discovered---with great relief and very happily---that
Starwatcher had not abandoned me; Starwatcher was not gone.