I suppose I should begin where the work itself began—Mt. Bethel, Pennsylvania, sometime in the eighties.  That is where I discovered I enjoyed writing, and that I had a knack for it.  In grade school we were given a Halloween project to write seasonal parodies of Christmas carols, and I remember sitting for an hour outside on a swing, noting gnarled branches and the darkening sky while stringing together the eeriest words I could think of.  Those were the first song lyrics I ever wrote.

When we lived in the big house, my oldest brother got into Christian music, which prompted him to try his hand at verse.  I was trying to start a band with my two closest friends, one who played most instruments and one who had just gotten a guitar.  By default, I was the singer.  More accurately, I made demonic gurgles into a microphone from inside a darkened closet.  I showed my brother one of the first songs, called “The Place Where Shadows Dance”, which wasn’t really about anything, and he showed one of his in return.  All I remember is the line “leave your world of dismal gray”.  To his credit, this exchange of poetry was enough to encourage me to continue.  Even more, he instructed me (as only older brothers can) to start a file of everything I wrote, and never throw any of it away, so that someday I could record a thematic album about growing up in Christ.  He could not have known what he started.

From Mt. Bethel, my family moved to Forrest Park, Georgia.  My cousin Shawn lived just down the hill.  After a short period of hatred and belittlement, all on my part, we became best friends, and immersed ourselves in the more alternative and progressive elements of pop culture.  We began thinking of ourselves as actors and artists, for all intents and purposes becoming no more than character reflections of anyone we admired.  My writing became neurotic and self-indulgent.  Also, now in my teens, I started dating, so romance and lust factored in.  I began my first journal with the intent of becoming famous, a focus I later came to despise.

I must make a side note before proceeding.  The format of this book is for the most part chronological, but the divisions are based more on my personal state of mind than on geography.  The confraternities tied to each group of poems refer to the select few individuals who were involved in my life at the time of writing.  These cannot be as neatly packaged as I would like, as they frequently carried over into the next, but they were nearly enough distanced by location changes to use such scenery as the measure of the era.  Only I know who each confraternity consisted of, and I make no apology for it; there are some things too personal even for my readers.  That said, my eighth grade and freshman year began The Late Foundational Period of writing—for the sake of this book, a starting point.

On the final day of my first year of high school, I was attacked in a racial incident, which prompted me to enroll in a private Christian school in Tampa, Florida, the following autumn.  I was overwrought and racked with all the usual baggage teenagers weigh themselves down with.  Private school was a very different experience; the host of characters seemed more sophisticated, religion came into sharper focus, and I was further encouraged, if not forced, to explore poetry, to even define myself by it.  My days there are what you will come to see as The Early Sociopathic Era.

The year came and went.  I found piety in religion to be increasingly intolerable, just as I found our national system of education.  The distaste of the mundanity of adolescence urged me to venture past county lines and seek out darker individuals to commune with.  This, The Prime Sociopathic Era, came up empty handed, finding itself mired in loneliness and with a restless spirit.

Late into that period, I transferred back to public school, having served my time with little but patience to show for it.  My friends were entirely replaced with a more extreme type, people who understood depression, who were drawn to self-destruction, all of whom were unabashed in searching for love.  Even so, it was a time of isolation and despair, what I came to know as The Late Sociopathic Era.

One summer—I can’t remember which—I found myself, for an extended stay, between a small neighborhood in New Jersey and a smaller one across the Delaware in Pennsylvania, where The Intimate Period began.  This time overlapped significantly with the periods on either side, as it was possible to maintain two distinct realities for the duration of the long distance relationship that incited it.  Indeed, the two played off each other, adding dimensions I could not otherwise have fathomed.  But again, the extent of that is for none other than me to know.

At this point, after graduation, there is a gap in eras, as there was a season devoted wholly to another book—Akashic Ash—during which no material escaped.  So then, we resume with The Dissolution, which was in fact an answer to the missing book, in the space of which I had relocated yet again, from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Nashville, Tennessee.  This span was spent in cafés, nightclubs, and concerts, sharing time with a series of menial jobs, and re-evaluating life.  This period also overlapped with the next, as another summer vacation to Maine brought with it another long distance relationship, again scarring my life distinctly.

The harshest divide, though, ushering in the final era of the collection, was the death of the cousin I loved.  The Broken Era was saturated with that sadness.  I give you fair warning then; guided by these eras, events, and ever-changing confraternities, this collection is not permitted to end on an overtly positive note.  No, that is for a book still to come.  But I promise you it will.

 

© 2001 by Ryan Christian Hedegard