//------------------------------//
// Introduction 
// Story: Slowly Drifting, or The Lost Verses of Perique Blend 
// by Cynewulf 
//------------------------------//

There comes a time when

Talk about how I got here?

Life must be lived forward but experienced back

List:

--Talk about the first morning?
--Reflection?
--The cosmology? find out native word
--On Writing?
--Should I start with poems? 



Look.


I don't know how to start this. It's not a good beginning for a writer and I'm well aware of that. Why should you read this little book of poems when I apparently can't even put together a few sentences to describe what it is you're holding? I can hear you asking it even now.


I write you from my new home, dug by a friend into the side of cliff face. It is warm as such things can be, drafty at times but not unbearably so, and overlooks a great lake. It truly is a better home than the last few months have led me to expect. Shipwrecked as I was, I had come to see nothing in my future but a kind of awkward eternal vagrancy. But I have a bed now, and slightly primitive wood floors. I even have candles and a rough table I built myself.


All this to say, that I'm struggling to find a way to express what this volume in such a way as to impart any of what it actually means to me, and what it's already done.


I could describe how its existence bouyed my spirit in terrible times. I could mention how I risked death more than once so as not to be separated from the pack that held my bundled poems and maps. I could tell you about scrawling these words hiding under trucks and waiting in ditches. I had nightmares after the Antean that the words helped to soothe. Time has washed over me and only this final tie to my former life kept me sane, kept me who I am. 


That's the best I can do. I can write when I need to, and when I want to. The story, the poem--the words on the page are a dream and once I wake from the dream I'm clueless. Right now, I'm awake, and all to self-aware, and so I stumble all over myself. 


Maybe one day, all of it will be put together but I doubt it.  Have you ever looked at a page and wondered how long it took to write that page? No doubt you've assumed all of this page was written at one time.


But already I've stretched it all out over a few years. I return over and over again to this pile of prose and verse and poke at it. I'll grow obsessed, working feverishly. Editing, writing new material, changing names and details... And then eventually, slowly, inevitably, I give up. I go back to my life in the river reeds and the creek beds. The book is too big. Life is fleeting before the longevity of art, even shoddy attempts like my own. 


How many times can you say--this should be finished. I should write this--before you grow to hate the taste of those words in your mouth like curdled milk? How long can you hold a story or a feeling before it wilts and rots and infects you? Can you cradle words like a foal asleep at last and expect of them timidity? Could you bind the Antean? And could you with time and world enough cut language down to size?


It's thoughts like these, aimless, formless, frustrating, bleary-eyed--let's dispense with all that. The truth is that its thoughts like these, cynical at best, that keep me up at night. Thoughts, honest ones and forthright ones, concerning my absence from Equestria. Concerning my farm and my agent and the shop down the road in the village. How long did it take for the back entrance watchpony to notice I was gone?


It's sad to realize that only my regulars, old stallions with bitter tongues and sad eyes, knew I was gone. At some point only they knew and nopony else. I had no wife or husband, no darling foal. I was myself alone, a family unto myself, an island in a sea of equinity. And now, ironically, fittingly, I am this way forever.


Eight years. Wow, I really got sidetracked there, didn't I? This is more of a log than an introduction.


The snow? The snow can bite my ass. Wish I was worth a damn at weatherworking. But it makes for good writing, strange enough. The world rarely makes for bad writing. When we write foul or untrue things I find the world was working against me more than not. Perhaps that's bias. Probably is. Perception is flawed fundamentally. Sometimes I wonder how arrogant it must be to assume any of what I see is accurate.


Even on the verge of sleep I finish this, writing a decade in exile.


This was to be my introduction and after some thought, it is a good one.


I was not structured or organized. I postured as much as I wilted in apathy. I tried but did not always try. I was lonely. The world was often dark and often cold and always dangerous. My call for help never made it.


This is what I lived as I wrote. And it's all you need to know.


This wasn't for you.



I think it was for me.




~Perique Blend