You must cross your heart and kiss your elbow.

The truth is- no one can save a soul which does not want to be saved. We wait for salvation, but does it wait for us? Or does it move on to someone else, and do we miss our chance? I have never been a chorus girl so I refused to be immortalized as one. If I am just that to you, then wait outside. Tweet from there. Wait till you realize Dr. Seuss never rhymed with damaged. Break the rules, break the mold. Break your shoes, break the cold. I am no chorus girl.

Today I spent writing. And seeing if I wanted to heal. I did not. So I had a drink and played a game. Ohh! You all know how playing games is my favorite. So I asked a bunch of my readers, and another handful of friends, to text me a word -any word- so that I could write with it. Rules are I cannot stop writing until a page is filled and also that I cannot judge nor stop whatever comes to my mind. And so this is some of what you have given to me. To you. Don't expect to comprehend, don't expect it to make sense on first read, don't expect at all. Draw what you will, and then do come share it with me. Only, if you can stop tweeting that long.

ACHIEVEMENT- ashleigh
Achievement is in the eyes of the beholder. It is the will of the masquerader. What I do in life will not be measured in references or pounds, or dollars or damned relationships. No, what I do will be measured in faces and pages, conversations and moments. Achievement is on the shoulders of me, and therefore, you. What will you be measured in? Do you feel the need to be measured at all? Achievement seems to go hand in hand with judgement..by someone else. Yet I find my harshest critic cannot hurt me half as much as I do myself. Achievement is as big as a high award of esteem and honor, or as small as the point of this moving pen. It as medium as the lunch I have finally agreed to eat. Achievement is in the eye of the beholder. Hold me, and I will hold you.


INSANITY - melana
I find this predictable even in context. Especially in context. The word is void of creativity, of color, or correlation to anything but some dark and shallow past which is blamed for everything. I am clearly mad and not void of this word. Insanity can be cute; a coy reason for feeling or sounding out of place. Yet it can be ugly and boresome, because excuses are such. Insanity as an adjective doesn't interest me much, nor does it explain hardly anything much to me. It is not mysterious. Mysterious is interesting to me! Open-ended; a potentially colorful feast of my sole healthy habit for curiosity. Mystery is chanceful, glorious or impetuous of rot- the key word of course being 'or.' And shit, here I've gone and broken my rules of description and correlation for this game because I haven't written about the word but another word, and context. A context that quite clearly both bores and angers me with predicability. Yes, even anger bores me now. Shoo, context, or fly. At least flying would be worth my time. Insanity. Is just kind of old-fashioned. An disloyal faux fur covering the shoulders of a perfectly cute outfit.

BOTTLE - austin
A bottle is such of containment,
yet it makes me feel quite the opposite.
What say you, Bottle?
Art thou not hand nor foot? Nor keg nor twist-off?
That which we call a bottle by any other name would ring as sweet!
Oh- I so do like the word bottle,
how it rolls from my throat a mere word forth my day. Or your day.
How easily it can then be fandangled into a sort of funny British accent, and how my
lips smack before each recitation.
Oh sweetness, do contain me!
Do what you will, Bottle, to enwrap me in your glass, so strong but sheer-
transparent to the world my love for you with willing imprisonment by your realm.
Contain me, Bottle, else I shalt break you..
For every delicacy which cannot hold on must fall
from my shelf
in a glittery display of shard and surface.
Contain me, Bottle, else I consume you first.

DISAPPOINTMENT - LJ
Everywhere I tilt my head in this forsaken room is a picture of someone who has disappointed me. And they are, in fact, faces I love. So I think over to myself- is it really these people who have disappointed me, or is it the love. Is it I who has disappointed both? Could it be that we try so hard to be something worthy that we become nothing at all? Worthwhile is a small matter of someone else's comparisons, but worthy is a greater obstacle of our own. Because it is so often, isn't it?, that we feel disappointed in others when really, we are upset with ourselves for not making us worthy enough for them. What is good enough? There isn't anymore a published code of standards like there was in my adolescence, and I sense that maybe the intuition for perfection and the over-agility to please was not my idea in the first place. Perhaps I am more brainwashed than I think.
Disappointment promotes excuses often times, such as the following; I sent out the message for a bunch of you to participate in this game with me (because games, you know, are my favorite), and only less than half of you responded. If I am purposefully rational I say; he is probably driving, or sleeping, or working, or writing his Great Aunt Hans a thinking of you note. He's just- not thinking of me right now. Excuses freeze over disappointments to be heated up and dealt with another time. Now, what's your excuse for me?


These, just a few of what I drew from you. Some funny sort of sentences to make you think, and to make me loosen up. Mind you, these paragraphs are not addressed to the prescribed names, I just thought I might give credit to those vocab waiters who struck the most tangible words in my conscious tonight. The others to come. And of course, the night ends with Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of Ms. Soto's favorites, and a perhaps trite yet warmly lingering anecdote I scribbled initially in but a half-sleep this morning:







You will always owe somebody something,
but you will never owe anybody yourself.


Tera.