Prologue

It's summer again.
Hot and dry and eating my bones, and it makes me realize that it's been more than a year since I left. Seventeen months. For a person who has only been alive for seventeen years,  this seems a ridiculously long time.  I'd like to say that a lot has happened in these seventeen months, but the truth is, not much has happened at all, and that's what makes it so remarkable.

 I am not one to forget things easily, especially those things that so test and stretch my spirit. I still remember - in vivid abstraction - every detail.  After a year passed, I began to feel a need to write it all down. The story began to form: sitting and festering in my mind, gathering the memories together into one semi-homogenous mixture that I could pour out through my fingertips.

I couldn't tell you where it all began. I can only tell you where it began to end. Seventeen months ago I made the first of a series of descisions that set into motion the very liberation of my soul. What follows is a series of letters written to various people, in the last year and a half, as part of my search to find understanding of the events that had held me down, and the new life I had found.

Now, I must first remind you that I have the terribly poisonous mind of an artist. While this story is so near and dear to me that I cannnot help but be honest in some sense, you must grant me the freedom of literature and poetry. After all, there is always some truth to be found in lies...