Nearly fifteen years ago, on Thanksgiving day, I entered a hospital room in Des Moines and stood over the inert body of a good friend. His lungs rose with forced air from a machine, his heart beat, but his voice was gone; silent, fallen away, not even a whisper along the reeds of a slow and lazy river. Over his face lay a veil of desperate sadness, the look etched over a man’s brow when he realizes he hadn’t meant to commit suicide. There he lay, nonetheless, having failed to save himself. Joe was 27 years old, frail and worn, dressed in a hospital burial gown. Family in the hallway passed Thanksgiving dinner between each other in tinfoil pockets, paper plates, cold comfort. They let me in to see him so that I could say goodbye. Tears rolled from my eyes, but my throat closed up and I couldn’t talk. To reach out and hold him one more time… to open my heart and say what I wanted to say…

Although I have worked desperately to fill in the fissures of my own life, I am consumed by shame of such brittle plasterwork. Desperate and searching, running cut hands over the coarse dark floors of my soul, I find nothing but the haunting memories of those fragrant years. The air was sweeter, the laughter brighter, shadows remained banished as friends surrounded, so many nights spent in rapture with burning hearts alive. Though vulnerable as I was, I wore the shield of a gasoline future just waiting for the plugged spark.

Now, as I saddle up for another last ride across a sunburnt and salt parched plain, as I near the edge of a dark horizon upon which the camp flames of missing people burn on into the night, I feel my legs grow weak in the saddle, my hands let loose the reins, my hat has fallen around my neck and the world has closed her eyes to me. I struggle to warm my withering hands by a single ember, I look around and see no one. The more I hear myself talk, the more I realize I am no storyteller - merely a story repeater; a failure, a fool.

What have I become but the sentient wraith searching blindly, viciously, for a locked chest without a key? To what have I aspired but my own hopeless tarot reading - a future so impossible, so unattainable, as to merit ridicule from even the least presumptive witch of Fate? They tell me I’m not broken, that there is no such thing as irreparable, but when I look deep into the mirror, I see a vessel emptied and a torch quenched.

One night many, many years ago, I was lying under a bridge with someone I only marginally trusted. I could not sleep. Out there in the woody hills, I heard a muffled scream nearby. I stayed silent hoping they would not come for me - hoping they could not see me. And isn’t that where Death stands now? I can hear him sliding between the brush and low branches. Doomed to repeat my same mistakes, doomed to grab my revolver, clutch it to my chest, to make a choice…

I’m tired of making that choice. I’m tired of falling off my horse and getting back on. There are riders I pass dead on their horses long ago and too weak to pull their triggers. They don’t even nod to a passing stranger enveloped within the same storm that chokes us both. The night here never ends, the ground is cold, the food is terrible and I can’t hear myself think over the silence.

And just when I think I’m riding out into the rising sun, I open my eyes and see the pitch blackness of my own soul. I whip harder, in frenzy, deeper still into the wound, into the bloodstream of my own folly, of my own death.

Footsteps creep closer to the edge of my camp. His knife is poised, his eyes twinkling by moonlight. Where did you go, Joe? Why did you have to leave camp? Death waits quietly for me to raise my gun… and I have to make a choice once more.