Being now a happily married man, I find it hardly believable I ever wrote this.  But I was different in my youth.  My passions were not yet named, my muse was intangible, and my poetry was without focus.  This was the first journal I ever completed; only in hindsight do I realize how foolish I was.  The subject is long gone and I have recovered every bit of what I felt I lost at the time.  I scarcely look back now on even the era, living as I do so exceedingly beyond what I ever hoped or imagined for myself.  It is presented then as any piece of fiction might be, drawing from experience, redressing actual accounts, overstating and embellishing for the sake of a story anyone might relate to.

This is both a personal journal and a collection of ignorant love songs.  It is the working out of personal conflict through ink.  It is neither entirely true nor entirely made up, but rather subsequent diagrams of an evolving perception.  Bear in mind my youth at the time of writing.  It may make some of the material more stylistically palatable, as I was overly influenced by whatever I was reading at the time.  I can offer no other help than that as to why this book exists.  It came to life of its own accord, and it shall in time come to rest forgotten on some obscure library shelf.  So be it.

 

© 1995, 2001 by Ryan Christian Hedegard