A reminiscence

The other day I was rummaging through the storage bins of my memory, and I found the remains of what may be the first short story I ever wrote. It turns out that in what must've been third or fourth grade we had to write somekind of story about living on the frontier, and I chose to create a journal for a cowboy who was on a cattle drive from Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere on North along the Chisholm trail to the railroads that would take them back East. Well, being the strange one that I am, I chose to focus on the lonliness of being out there. There were stampedes and other troubles, but mostly our man was overwhelmed by lonesomeness and eventually he hung himself with his own belt.
Of course, all this is from memory, so I can't be sure of the exact details, but the general story is as I represented it here. Pretty wierd to think that I was writing existentially at the age of eight or nine, but actually that's probably fairly in keeping with my long held worldview. I've always been most captured by the difficult, the heavy, the solitary aspects of life. The things that we have to struggle through alone in our own minds, those are what affect me greatly, and it's just interesting, for me at least, to remember one more quick little aspect of my own long career as a dirging writer.