Dear elegy,

I thought about you a lot over the weekend - more than you would ever
know. I remember when you first started coming here a number of years
ago. IIRC, crying in your dorm hallway, not knowing where to turn or who
to turn to. To the benefit of everybody here now, and those who have
come and gone, you found this place.

I know that expressing your creativity through your writing is extremely
important to you. Sometimes the sins of others from our past robs that
which is most important to us. I know because it has happened to me
quite often in the past, and most certainly will again in the future.

But that crevasse will be traversed. It always is. Some measure of
happiness, that can only be measured by you in your own level of
contentment, will return and peace will live again in your heart and
mind. It may be fleeting, or it may stay for awhile, but it comes and it
is always a precious time when it does. That is the only vengeance that
I try to employ against those who have brutalized me and my past.

Your post of the other day reminded me of my own time when I yearned for
graduate school. I sometimes still do, but then I'm reminded of just how
much strength and character it takes for me to meet the day sometimes.
That is all-encompassing energy that most people are able to take and
focus and utilize in meeting their own personal goals and wants. Mine is
used up on what is generally considered mundane tasks that are usually
taken for granted. But I don't take them for granted. At least I try
not to. Sometimes I need to be reminded, too.

Finally, in the end when we traverse this plane into the unknown, it will
be recognized by all who knew you, and by many who did not, that you will
have graduated this grad school called life Suma ***** Laude, exhibiting
great measures of courage and oozing exceptional strength of character in
the presence of all and the face of adversity, that will be understood as
an example of meeting life and its challenges, even if they cannot
explain why.