Departed

I left the office last night with a bit of melancholy, a strange melancholy, not one of the more routine melancholies of ordinary life, but the strange melancholy of embarking on extraordinary life. And I don’t mean, at least yet, “extraordinary” in the sense of “wonderful,” “splendid,” “astonishing”—that remains to be seen—but merely “outside of the ordinary,” “not usual.” It is the melancholy of leave-taking with the prospect of not coming back—which is highly unlikely—that is to say, I will be back. But more likely, I could return a changed man, decidedly not the I who just bid his friends, colleagues, and loved ones good-bye. If the merely extraordinary proves extraordinary, who actually comes back from that? The guy who left? He was an all right guy, mostly, I liked him well enough. I might miss him.

Oil changed, the car is packed for the first leg of the journey, the domestic.