by j. staffeld

Created on: May 06, 2008

It is a period of record cold in Omaha. The Great American Desert is as cruel today as it was during deepest depression era dust bowls. But it is not the land that is cursed. It is the wind the wind that never dies but flows like blood through the air. It has seen great death and great triumph as it has blown through time. It has witnessed legends rise and fall like the mountains it withers. And it cares not not of the wings that depend upon it or the lives destroyed from its fury. The gentle indifference of the world is never more evident than within the air that we need to survive but needs not us to exist. The sun will continue to rise and continue to set, fueling winds that will never care that any of us ever lived.

Chapter 1

I first noticed the pull at the age of twelve, though in hindsight it is easy to tell the seeds of the beast were firmly planted years earlier. My mother's house is filled with photographs of a boy who looks more like he just lost his dog instead of only just being told to say "cheese"... completely absent of smile, devoid of that glimmer that nearly every other child has in their eyes. I seem to relate more to that little boy now than his many other depictions that hide behind his newly learned smile as uncomfortably fake as the many different scenery backgrounds they place just behind him. Already he had learned it is better to pretend to live in heaven than admit to feeling only hell.

In the beginning the disease lurks not in shadows but in the blindness born from a spotlight. It is within the moments following a tragic, yet public, fall from grace that the beast first sinks its teeth in. It is not until its venom has already made its rounds deep within our veins that this dormant creature reveals its true self during the darkest of the night. By then, however, it is far too late to be helped.

It would be within my late teens that I was finally talked into seeking help for this now obvious depressive state that had by then completely consumed me. It was hard NOT to notice, as I stayed encamped in my bedroom. My father had recently transformed what used to be a cold, darkened basement storage room into a fully finished bedroom. I do not remember if it had always been the intention of having me move into that room but this certainly occurred none-the-less. Within this room I had everything I could ever need: a bed, some books, and a TVsmall but then I rarely really watched it though it was always on. Instead I read. Perhaps that in itself

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