I Really Wish I could Get the Hell out of Here, Pt. 1

Old friends have cast me aside. They won't call or write or anything. I made a terrible mistake, sure, and now I can't seem to get back to where I want to be. Where I need to be. The relationship didn't pan out. It went to hell when it failed. Whatever happened, though, it was my own decision that led me into it, so I have no one to blame. If I ever get back to Louisiana (and the highway has many, many turns) I'll know better. Hell, I knew better before I left. My tender years are long behind me. It's cold here in Dixieland, a hell of a lot colder than I like, and this place is everything that H.L. Mencken called it, a cultural Sahara, for me become an island on which I toil alone. There might not be a way out of here, just yet. But when it comes, there's no looking back, this time. Mixing my metaphors freely, I'll just say that I think of it as the last exit on a lost highway that I am very, very anxious to leave, at last. I wish I wish. I wish things had turned out better with B. I wish that friends hadn't made me make the choices that I had to make. I wish that I had never left Louisiana. I wish that I had gone there, in the first place, years ago, and never come back to this green valley that was my prison for so long, and is my prison, today. I am looking for a light. I pray that I find it soon. I have stored up some patience in these almost four decades of waiting, however. My time will come around again. Not like I envision today, probably nothing that I have even thought of thus far, but I am patient and time always tells. The wheel still turns. People have moved on, and we cannot blame people for cutting us out of their lives. We all have to nake our own decisions. And men, well, we have to be men.