This story is the most personal and reflective story I’ve ever written. Although there are naturally elements of fiction in it, the mental and writing process the main character goes through along with some of the stories themselves, strongly reflect who I am. Or at least who I was in the time I wrote this story. I was in a darker mood when I first began working on this story and you’ll see that reflected in the stories themselves. What I mainly wanted to address in this foreword, however, is the incompleteness of the story.
I’ve written many pieces since I’ve written this one but it remains one of the pieces I’m most proud of because of my aforementioned connection to the stories. It was originally inspired by the major arcana of a tarot deck. It struck me how each card has a place or a story to tell in the larger story of our lives and I set out to tell those stories in one character’s life. With each story, it became more and more powerful. More and more personal.
Towards the end of my time working on this story, I found myself going through some major life and mood changes. I wasn’t able to continue writing the story the way I wanted to. Years later, I still read through this story and find myself awed by what I imagine I must have been thinking back then. When I first decided to post this, I considered spending some time to complete the remaining stories and arcana but decided against it.
This story, as many stories are, is a picture in time of who I was and what I thought. To this day, many of those same ideas and thoughts ring true but some of them do not. In order to maintain the moment of time this story represents, I chose not to impose my current ideas and thoughts onto the story. Instead, I think that left best to the Fool and his future companions.