Mort: Four Right Turns

"Mort" is a fictional series of sorts. It may serve you well to read from the beginning- looking back for prior installments. I don't know much about an efficient way of doing this so I wish you luck.

I was six years-old and walking down a city street in Woodward, Oklahoma. I had only been in the first grade for a couple of weeks and I had been granted the trust and privilege to walk home by myself.
I did it every day for at least two weeks- the same path every day. The same turns, those same few suburban blocks.
Then, one day, I got to a particular corner and I paused. That pause turned into five minutes or more of standing at a street corner. I looked back from which I came and then I looked at my options. I suddenly didn't feel right. I thought about it too long. Actually, I had NEVER thought about it until then; I had just walked home all of those other times. I made the mistake of thinking about it and thinking about for too long. And I kept thinking about it...
I had to make a decision. So I did. I went left. I walked about two blocks down a street that I had never been down before. A typical white trash family sat on a front porch and watched this odd little boy that had been loitering at the nearby corner way too long past the point of comfort. I tried not to acknowledge their stares.
I was going the wrong way. I knew I was going the wrong way but I kept going. Why? I guess because I thought it would turn into the right way. It never did. I had to go back.

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The smallest hurdles can be the most difficult to clear.
I think it's because they occur in such quick succession; one doesn't have time to recover properly.

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I can't get far enough away from some of my mistakes.
Those bad times: that nebulous confusion clouding every room of a house like poison gas....pffffftttt....I'm still too close to those times. I still feel like they can reach out and grab me and pull me back in.

It's too easy to give the wrong person too much of your life.
Too many times over too much time I have woken up in the wrong place. I have walked into too many rooms and felt that ominous darkness of regret the instant I locked eyes with who I knew to be the worst of them. I shacked up with 'em and I could feel the fumes of insanity, selfishness, and dishonesty like a hot gasoline-soaked rag.
Yet, I was there until the crash and burn. I always had to be evicted from the nightmare; I never would just wake up on my own.
It should have been the easiest thing in the world to get up and walk out; to jump over that tiny person that shrunk a little more each day.

We do wrong to find right. Mostly.
Every person in every tiny room in every city, town, village, prison, farm house, homeless shelter, hut or whatever has a Christmas list of regrets they wish to wash their dirty hands of. I can only speak for myself when I say that I've never done anything wrong with the idea of it being and remaining wrong; we all want short-cuts and escape routes. We also want pride and ego to make it back to shore on the life raft when the whole goddamn ship sinks. That's where it gets especially ugly.......

Enough wrong turns and you either wind up where you started or you find the right way.

I don't miss walking into a room and feeling nothing but wrong in the air.