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Chapter One
Over the past year, I’ve thought a lot about whether my life has been
worthwhile. I think about it now as I loosely grip the handle of my revolver. I
think about it as I hear the words of my young friend resonate in my brain as
loudly as a bullet: “Life is always optional.”My young friend. Is that what she was? Was that the compromise I had accepted? How pathetic. Those who know me, of course, would more likely say that she was the source of my destruction, and they would be correct. I understand that. But she was also something more, something so much more. She was something that none of them could ever understand, and I do neither of us justice by using a word as passive as “friend.”
A sliver of cold air slices through the window seal of my old Buick and further
chills me. I doubt that most people know how numbingly cold it gets on the
plains of west Texas in the winter. Whatever the temperature, it always seems
colder due to the bleak landscape and relentless howling of the winds. Or,
perhaps it’s the vastness of the gray sky that offers no prospect of change.
For mile after mile, there’s little more to see than wiry shrubs rolling over
hardened earth and around abandoned oil pumps. Parked on the side of this
desolate highway, I’m only about seventy miles from where I was born; I had
once thought this barren land to be the most beautiful on earth.