r/creativewriting

i want someone to honestly look at me and give an honest description of my soul, even if told that i am ugly, loser parasite, i would still be happier than to be never been by someone honestly, but maybe i dont want to be happy, thatis why, is it my fate?, cause i love it.

So this question is always hard for me lol I love names! Years ago, if you would have asked me it would have been Elaine. Now though I wouldn't be able to tell you what my favorite name was, so let me hear yours!

Ever since I can remember writing has been my biggest passion, however I have given into the lack of motivation a couple of years ago. The last proper thing I wrote was about two years ago.

So please, inspire me and give me a topic and I have to write about it 😄

I write and I'm in a creative writing club in skl and i had a loongg.... Talk w the tr aft class the both times i read it out to the grp and once i was referred to the counciler 😬, so i was js wondering if its a universal writers experience or am i js wierd???

The music rang out through the house. “Have you ever been at some place recognising everybody’s face until you realised that there was no one there you knew.” He felt his teeth clench as the words landed, fighting to keep his composure, the mask as he nodded to friends at the party.

The clock ticked slow seconds, matching his pace as he walked from room to room. 2:36 AM, later than he had thought he’d be out. It was expected, he had to turn up, he always did. A fist appeared in his view bringing him back in the moment and he casually bumped it, reaching in to embrace one of his friends. A few quick pats on the back and then moving on, beginning to tread up the staircase.

He looked down at the bottle in his hand before taking a swig, the taste and smell of hops and grain and alcohol assaulting his senses. He fought back the grimace, clinking his bottle with another of his friends as he passed. He reached the top of the stairs, carefully moving his way through the people, more fist bumps, high-fives and nodded greetings as he looked from door to door, seeking something that seemed impossible: quiet.

As he neared the end of the corridor the mass of people lessened and the sound of the music lessened. He tentatively pushed open a door into a darkened room, alert in case it was already occupied by people locked in an intimate moment. A mistake he had made before. This time though it seemed safe and he moved inside, collapsing on the bed in the middle of the room. He closed his eyes and just lay there, slowing his breathing and letting his mind just drift.

He didn’t know how long he lay there for when he heard a soft awkward cough. His eyes flashed open and he saw her, standing just inside the entrance way. “Trying to hide from the party too, huh?” she said awkwardly as she gave a rigid wave.
He nodded, “yeah, sometimes people are a bit much” he replied gruffly. Her face fell slightly and she turned away “oh, ok I’ll leave you to it”. He felt his hand twitch towards her and he quickly stammered “it..it’s okay., you don’t look like you would cause much noise, there is plenty of room here.” Her smile returned and she turned back, moving to perch on the end of the bed.

He edged up the bed slightly and she lay back, joining him to stare up at the ceiling. “It’s at least quiet down this end of the house” she said softly.
“Yeah, it’s nice. I’ve not seen you at any of these parties before” he replied questioningly.
She laughed “I’m new in town, they had to vet me to make sure I was cool enough to attend”
“Oh well I assume you passed, or did you sneak your way in?”
“Well I will leave that up to your imagination”
He smiled, “guess I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Guess that explains the hiding in the dark, meeting all these new people must be draining”
“You don’t know the half of it, so many new names and faces. I’ve been in constant fear that I would introduce myself to someone I just met. I’m Liz by the way”
“Oh I know, I met you about half an hour ago” he said turning his head to look at her. She turned her head, a shocked expression on her face just as a smile crept across his and he laughed. “Ok, maybe not, I’m Joe, good to meet you.”

She playfully punched his arm “That was just mean,” she said, feigning a hurt look. Joe smiled, meeting her gaze before returning to stare at the ceiling. “I would have remembered those eyes if I had met you tonight.” She blushed slightly.
“You don’t have bad eyes yourself; they look kind. So, you know why I am here, why is Mr Seems to Know everyone hiding up here? Got a long line of paramours seeking your attention?”
Joe let out a hollow laugh. “Nothing like that, just not feeling it tonight, I guess. All felt a bit empty. Plus, the beer sucked, tastes like it went off a week ago.”
She laughed “Yeah, it is bad. I’ve been on the same bottle all night, it’s still almost half full. Guess I should be glad you were not in the party mood tonight, hiding away can get lonely.”
Joe rolled onto his side and found her already looking at him. “Yeah…, lonely, that I understand.” He coughed nervously. “It is certainly more pleasant with company.”
She turned her head to the side, smiling. “A lot more pleasant”. She leaned her head up slightly as Joe moved his down when there was a loud crash from the doorway, followed by a muffled “Oh sorry dude”. Joe and Liz both looked towards the door in shock and surprise to see the form of another of the partygoers collapsed on the floor, slowly picking himself up and the door flung wide open. Both of them burst into nervous laughter, and the guy staggered out the door, closing it with a loud bang and Joe rolled on to his back again, slightly closer than before. “Seems he didn’t dislike the beer taste” he said and Liz giggled.
“No, it would seem he did not.” She yawned. “Its late” she said, “I should be going soon. Thankyou for letting me join you Joe”
Joe smiled “Anytime, there is a party next week, actually pretty sure there is a party every week. If you are interested, I’ll be the one hiding in the darkened room again”
She giggled again “I’ll make sure I check them all”. She stood, her hand brushing over Joe’s as she did so. She smiled at him. “Guess I will see you then” she said as she opened the door, stepping out into the light. “I guess you will,” Joe said smiling. He lay on the bed for a few more minutes, letting his mind run through what had just happened. He then stood up and with a smile opened the door, returning to the party.

They set me high upon the table bench, So all the heavy eyes could see my face. The room was thick with ink and smoky stench. A grand and terrifying, friendless place.

The bad man wore a robe of midnight thread, He fed me sweetmeats, stroked my tangled hair. He whispered wicked things that you had said, And asked me if the devil dog was there.

I only wanted him to smile at me, I only wanted them to call me good. I didn't know about the gallows- tree, I didn't know they'd built it out of wood.

I pointed out my finger like a toy. I spoke the words he taught me how to frame. The courtroom shouted out with cruel joy, And sealed the black rope tightly to your name.

Now Malkin tower is empty, cold and still, The bad men left, their heavy wagons gone. The wind is weeping over Pendle hill, And I am left to face the dark alone.

I'm sorry , mammy, for the table bench, I'm sorry for the words I dropped like stone. I traded you for sugar plums and praise, And now I have to walk these moors alone.

[ ] Prologue

A small, dark figure wanders through the wintry forest, its movements heavy and slow. The once-red cloak trailing in the snow has grown dark and gray, stained with soot and ash from countless fires. The moonlight illuminates its features, revealing a young girl, an oddity. She walks alone, with a confidence that belies her fragile frame, ice encrusting her gray skin and clothes. But she doesn't shiver, nor does she breathe. She simply walks, her black eyes focused on nothing, the soft golden glow of her pupils the only thing lighting her path.

She pauses in a tiny clearing, and pulls an object of silver and black from her robe, pressing a button to illuminate a screen. Her gaze travels along the words displayed, as it had so many times in the previous months.

Banshee: Offline 8/17/2105

Reaper: Offline 2/15/2115

Her chin quivers. The Banshee has been gone for years now, but the Reaper's status is new.  February 15th, 2115.

Today.

Tears begin to trickle from her eyes and fall from her cheeks, the old pain springing forth with renewed strength.

She'd known this day would come. When she'd be alone again, just like before. But she isn't ready.

She falls, her knees sinking into the snow before meeting hard ground. She doesn't even notice as the device falls from her hands, and she stares down at nothing as she takes a ragged breath, a crackling hiss breaking the silence before she lets out a low groan.

Slowly, golden tendrils laced with black appear from her back, growing and spreading up into the trees and wrapping tenderly around trunks and branches. They begin to tighten as the girl hugs herself, seeking an embrace but finding only silence and cold. She suddenly takes a new breath and throws her body into a piercing scream that shifts into a sharp, broken hiss as her appendages snap taut and her voice breaks.

The sounds of crunching wood fill the air to match her cry, the trees breaking apart with the force of her grip. Then, just as suddenly, she goes quiet and kneels there, shuddering, as seemingly endless tears trail down her face, before curling up in a small ball on the cold ground. Her cloak pools and her tendrils curl around her in the darkness, where she remains for the rest of the night.

[ ] Chapter 1 Start

I creep through the dusty ruins, searching the darkness around me for the telltale lights of the monsters. The remaining shelves of the abandoned warehouse tower above me, like the skeletal skyscrapers outside. Mom and Dad always say people used to live in those things. Spooky. Those stupid towers of steel might as well be the pyramids of Egypt, for all I know of the world before the attacks.

I can faintly make out the remains of a collapsed shelf further into the swirling darkness, clearly the fault of a few rusted bolts. A thing that I ironicly also need to watch out for. I step closer, spotting a few unlooted boxes in the wreckage.

As I reach for one, a hand grabs my shoulder, yanking me back before I can react and making me release a muffled shriek through my nose. The intruder turns me quickly, and my eyes land on Dad. I quickly recover and hit him with a glare. "Mother f-----!!!" I yell, an electronic beep cutting off the rest of my curse.

He only laughs, helping me pick out some undamaged boxes as if he hadn't just scared me to death, which only makes me angrier.

"You can't just scare the s--- out of me and act like nothing's wrong!" I rail on him, "This place is way too dangerous to f------ scare people!" I reach up and turn a dial on the side of my jawpiece as I murmur, cutting down the volume of my mutterings as I rummage around for scraps and anything useful. "Stupid f------ son of a b----"

"You might want to cut back on the cursing, Sammy," he teases as we rummage in the mess of cardboard and plastic. "Maybe we should see if we can put filters on that brain of yours instead of just your jaw."

I stop rummaging and glare at him, and hear a soft chuckle from the side. Mom, undoubtedly listening in as she watches the area around us for those... things. I groan, the sound muffled and forced out my nose in a huff as I turn to look at her with a glare that says, "Not you, too."

I turn back to Dad at her smirk, leaning over him as he rummages around. "Hurry up. The longer we stay here the worse I feel about our chances." I whine.

At his lack of reply, I huff and go to another portion of the mess, starting a new search there.

Ugh. I hate scavenging runs.

After an houe, packs half full and stomachs less so, we make our way out of the wrecked building. As we climb the rubble of what must've been the west wall, I marvel as always at the fact --according to Mom and Dad-- that buildings like this behemoth once stood without issue. Clean. Blocky.

Looking back at the piles of metal and cardboard, among other things I don't know, I find that hard to believe. Thoughts of a world that would even need a place like this whirl around my mind as I move, feet clacking against cement and cracked asphault, along our route back home.

Despite Dad's playfulness back in the warehouse, I can see the tension in his shoulders now, walking between him and Mom as we always do, single file.

He's just as nervous as I am. I really shouldn't blame him for trying to have a little fun. For trying to make things a little less awful for us.

But I do.

This is not the world he knew. One wrong move, one lapse in judgement or missed cue, and it could cost us everything.

The thought makes me shiver as we make our way from the street into another huge building, this one seeming like they took the last one and put it on its side just because they like tall things. What were people thinking in my Dad's time? Why the huge metal and concrete structures? If one of them fell, that's a lot of weight.

I wonder how many people died when this one's upper floors came down. Chunks of it litter the street and even the neighboring buildings. I look back at them as we step inside. There could be people in that debris we just climbed over.

A flash of bitter jealousy flashes through my mind over how lucky they were. At least it was quick. And if not that, it was certain.

Inside, we pass by a counter and cross a hallway into a room with a massive oval table, with overturned chairs and one wooded end charred. Across the structure are three square sections that I can only guess were once windows lining the end of the room from floor to ceiling.

It's empty in here, but Dad leads us around toward those open squares even more slowly than he'd led us through the streets. The way he acts during these trips home, when we're moving deeper into the city, always makes me wonder why we still live here. Maybe we'll move away soon.

I'm writing a psychological thriller where two characters destroy each other's lives in different ways. At what point does revenge stop feeling justified and start feeling selfish to readers?

Each time you look in a mirror you look different, no matter where you when you take a look. Maybe your hair isn’t doing what you want, or maybe your acne is acting up again, or maybe the bags under your eyes are heavier than they were the day before.
The person in the mirror isn’t who you really are, but instead a projection of yourself in that moment.
One day that mirror might make you reflect back on that terrible thing happened. How could you have changed it?
Maybe you see yourself becoming someone you don’t love anymore. How can you love yourself again?
Maybe you just need to see yourself smile for the first time in a while. How can you smile at a time like this?
The mirror knows not what you feel inside, it only knows what you project to others. Are you faking it? Do you let others in? Or do you shut them out?
A mirror sees you from the day you’re born until the day you die. Give it something to watch.
Do you trust the image looking back at you? How can you ever truly trust someone if you don’t trust what’s inside?
Are you the same person in your house mirror and in the dive bar mirror?
When you cry in the mirror, who is really crying?
Does your reflection stay in the mirror after you’re no longer there? Does it remember every emotion you’ve felt while staring back at yourself?
Is it really even yourself? Or just your current image?
Can we change innately? Or are we always the same?
Can a mirror show internal change?
No it can’t. And it doesn’t matter.
Perception is reality to most, but not to you.
You know what your morals are. The mirror doesn’t.
You know the guilt you feel when you take an action outside of your morals. The mirror doesn’t.
You know the gut wrenching feeling when they leave. The mirror doesn’t.
The mirror only knows what you put in front of it.
Be more than a reflection.

Hey guys I am eighteen years old and am really eager to write my first book! I want to make a comedic paradoxical story revolving around the lives of five girls from a very posh private school in the uk. I want it to be ironic and have a light hearted tone generally whilst also drawing on some serious issues to do with class. Anyways I have written a prologue for it about this girl called Mary who has just left having a conversation with a mother who is thinking about sending her daughter there. Please let me know your thoughts!

‘Like is a strong word’, scoffed Mary, aggressively stirring a small silver teaspoon round her mug. Mrs Purnell raised an eyebrow curiously, ‘is it?’. Mary put down her saucer onto the small round coffee table and sighed theatrically as if to suggest a great deal about Mrs Purnell’s intellect. ‘Nowadays the word ‘like’ is extremely suggestive, you have to be quite careful.’ She purred. ‘I mean you can like tea but that suggests its like oh tea is alright but its not great, you know.’ Mary’s eyes met Mrs Purnell’s, whose tight Botox induced features were yearning to scrunch into a baffled knot at the front of her face. Mary continued, gesticulating wildly, ‘But in some cases ‘like’ can suggest much weightier things. Like if you claim to like Nicholas O’Brian who's this gorgeous boy in my chemistry class, then ‘like’ would suggest you want to get in his pants so its not really a question of indifference in that circumstance…’ Mrs Purnell’s eyebrows strained towards her hairline (alas they could not stray far from the upper echelons of her eyelid). Mary continued unfazed, ‘In fact the word then suggests quite a deal of passion. Of lust.’ She exaggerated the word with a taunting emphasis. ‘As the world is fostering a generation of slightly illiterate bright-eyed youths.’ She lowered her tone, granting each syllable a slow exaggerated precedence. ‘The word ‘like’ is peppered literally in every young person’s vocabulary. When it is used off the bat in sentences, it loses all meaning besides suggesting we find spaces awkward and need to appear like we are saying more than we actually are.’ She hesitated briefly before moving her eyes back to the wall and resuming rapidly ‘I suppose in the context of liking Burleigh, I could say yeah sure I liked it. Or I could be like fuck yeah, I liked it! Or I could say yeah I suppose I liked some parts of it.’ She paused, taking in Mrs Purnell’s unmoved squinting black eyes, so small and set into her milky complexion they reminded Mary of two pieces of caviar sinking into a smooth cream cheese cracker. ‘So its weighty, extremely suggestive. Tread carefully Mrs Purnell.’ Mary grabbed a handful of tortilla chips from a wide thick rimmed bowl on the coffee table and began to crunch each one down slowly, gazing into Mrs Purnell’s eyes, interrogatively. A few moments went by whilst Mrs Purnell awkwardly straightened her posture. She attempted to create a rebuttal to Mary’s soliloquised ramblings and eventually blurted, ‘Well if a word such as ‘like’ needs all of these considerations before conversation can progress, how do people ever discuss anything?’. Mrs Purnell’s eyes bulged and her jutted chin nodded resolutely, appearing satisfied with her claim. Mary was delighted and clasped her hands together making one soft clap before drawling on sarcastically. ‘Oh Mrs Purnell that is indeed the question! In this generation, you don’t. You sit still like a fat fucking hen with your mouth slightly open and head moving slowly from side to side until the universe throws you an opinion.’ Mrs Purnell blinked slowly. Mary leant forward and spoke slowly. ‘And then you whole heartedly scream your fucking head off about it, despite not really understanding what you are saying, until the world has moved on, which generally doesn’t take long.’ She reclined back and slouched into her lavender chesterfield sofa, scoffing a second handful of tortilla chips, mostly missing her mouth, creating a nest of crumbs round her collar and hair. ‘Then you adopt your prior resting stance, bumbling along in a cosy first world bubble until the next wave of activism piques your fancy. Makes life quite simple for us really.’ A period of resolute crunching. Mrs Purnell twitched and pulled at her stiff white collared shirt, laced with repulsive doe eyed baby lambs that diseased the garment from the collar to the tips of the arm cuffs. A prolonged silence wafted through the room. The faint ticking of an old wooden mantel clock – an inherited relic from some great aunt – was suddenly audible. Periodically, Mary sighed exasperatedly. Mrs Purnell was utterly perplexed by Mary’s forthright demeanour. She had never met a young woman who not only was so indifferent as to who she shared her opinions with but a young woman with such a prolific multitude of opinions at all. Her tone imbued she was angry, looking to pick at any ebbing frustration in her life and broaden it to some greater issue in the world. And yet she was perfectly content now. She smiled lazily and was sprawled with her manspreading legs and lolling head whilst making her way through the tortilla bowl like a cow – ignorant to the nature of the world beyond her pasture - chewing her cud. For a girl who had everything, Mary was certainly quite the contrast to her extravagant family home. Mrs Purnell was slightly disgusted by the girl but undoubtedly intimidated nevertheless. Her face scrunched further, attempting to delve into thought for an astute challenge to cast Mary’s way but not managing to encroach beyond the parameters of her bewilderment. With no further rebuttals drawn, she returned to the purpose of her visit. ‘Right. Your mother said you would be happy to speak to me about your experience at Burleigh, did I um… come at a wrong time perhaps?’ Mary stretched out and yawned, revealing chewed up tortilla nestled between her teeth and smeared over her tongue. ‘No, you’ve caught me in a great mood actually; I am more than happy to talk about Burleigh at present. Last night would have been rocky but this morning I’m feeling ready to go.’ She smacked her jaws together and drew breath between her teeth before bringing up her hands to once more support her rambles with flickering hand motions that was almost elegant, out of context. ‘I mean the bottom line is that your child… what’s her face, Susan?’ Mrs Purnell’s eyes narrowed. ‘Susan Purnell sounds like a name that will do just fine at Burleigh to be honest.’ Mary fell back into the sofa and playfully drawled in a sing-song tone ‘Susan Purnell! It really has quite a ring that will contribute wonderfully to the morning register I’m sure.’ Mary yawned. ‘Yeah, Burleigh is a place where you will feel like you get your moneys worth. I mean they play lacrosse and have a bunch of musicals. Also, it's in the middle of fucking nowhere so its unlikely little Susan will find herself ambling into the dodge parts of the Kentish countryside. Like Malling Green, God forbid.’ Mary shuddered melodramatically, ‘Sorry, excuse me. Malling Green is where the local state school is so… naturally quite a rough area. Anyways she will be fine.’ Mrs Purnell patted down her skirts and looked around slowly to locate her belongings, intending to make a swift departure. Whilst avoiding Mary’s attentive eye she curtly said, ‘I get the impression you didn’t like it.’ Mary’s eyes glistened as she waggled her finger towards Mrs Purnell as if the woman was a naughty little child. ‘Now now Lisa let's not be presumptuous. It was alright. Yeah, it was just fine.’

So for context me and my fiancée are each trying to write a fictional story for the other to read, for my choice I decided to write a story that takes place after the world discovers a way to travel to an alternate universe. In this alternate universe the Earth is exactly the same as the original Earth except it takes place in an alternate timeline where the cretaceous and jurassic period were mashed together leading to species from both periods coexisting together.

The issue is it takes a massive amount of energy to transfer people and supplies to the other side and when the main character gets to the other side there is only roughly a thousand people and a small colony built before the gateway is destroyed in a terrorist attack that severs the connection between the world's.

My issue is Ive already written a good bit and while writing this story I had this feeling in the back of my head that this sounded really familiar and after some investigation I realized I basically stole the concept of the 2011 show Terra Nova that I watched as a kid. Specifically using a portal to get to a prehistoric world to live in a colony surrounded by dinosaurs. Even the terrorist part happens in Terra Nova except that happened at the end of the show.

My question is if you were writing this, how would you go about keeping the same concept without it sounding like your ripping off the show. My fiancée has never seen the show so I know it'll go unnoticed but its going to bother me knowing that its basically a copy paste of the show.

I’m trying to write a character with bipolar disorder, possibly leaning towards the worst kinds. She is a woman in her early 20s if that is relevant. What are some things i can include to be as accurate as possible and what does bipolar disorder look like in an everyday life?

I've started noticing a pattern that I can't tell is normal or not.

If I spend a few days reading the same author or even the same genre, my own writing starts to shift a little. The sentences become longer or shorter, the dialogue changes, or I start describing things in a way that doesn't really feel like my usual voice.

It's not something I do on purpose, and I usually don't even notice it until I go back and reread what I've written later.

Lately I've been adding one extra review with quetext before I call a draft finished, mostly to see if it still sounds like me after spending hours reading someone else's work.. I'm still not sure if that's actually helping or if it's just making me more aware of the way my writing changes.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Do you just accept that your voice naturally shifts depending on what you're reading, or do you have a way of getting back to your own style?

I am 49,479 words into a book im writing. I ran it through our robo-pals and apparently its --awesome-- to which my titties set themselves on fire and ran out the room. I smell horsepukie. If I post this segment here, I hope i only get reviewed as if it were in a manuscript in front of a publisher. Keeping in mind this is just a snippet from a large novel already. Anybody listening promise to give honest, brutal honest? OK... Here goes... ONLY TRUTH! Is it good? Its my first ever attempt at writing.

I suppose another one of my first really memorable events began with a shower. It was a long walk in shower, 1970’s sunbeam yellow tile on all four walls, all the way up, down and across the floor and ceiling. My mom would have us 2 girls shower with her to speed the process up. We had just seen Freddy Kruger and my sister feared his imminent return through the portal under her feet, otherwise known as the shower drain. She was 7 or 8, and Freddy is horrifying to a kid that age. It didn’t seem like a big deal. But my mom just got increasingly angry that she didn’t want to stand DIRECTLY over the drain. She could still wash her. She wasn’t fighting that part, just the proximity of herself to Freddy the intruder. My mom wasn’t having it. I remember her saying, “IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE SCARED OF SOMETHING SO STUPID, I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING REAL TO BE SCARED OF!” And with those words, the shower began to fill with steam. I can still see it rolling around, in between the walls, consuming the space entirely. I could see nothing. Only hearing the screaming ringing through my head so loudly, bouncing off the walls of ugly tile, reverberating inside of my skull. Then out of the seemingly endless cloud of steam, AN ARM. A LEG. A HAND. My Lord, she’s trying to fight. She’s trying to escape the burning water she’s being held under. Momma finally let her go, turned off the water, and said, “Now go to your room and think about that!”

Oh, she did. She thought hard for about a minute. I can still see her standing there with her bright, red lobsterish skin. She said to me, “Get dressed. We are leaving.” I didn’t know what she meant, or where the heck we were going, but 4 or 5 year old me didn’t really ask a lot of questions. It wasn’t ever in my best interest to do so. So I just did as she said, I got dressed. She put my favorite teddy bear, a guy by the name of BearBaby in an old metal suitcase the size of a briefcase and gathered the handful of change that appeared out of nowhere. Now looking back I understand she must have been saving her pennies, nickels and dimes for something. I don’t really know if she was saving for the breakout attempt, or if she was saving for a new My Little Pony and the break out just happened. She opened the window and out we went. I can still see her on the outside of the window, gesturing for me to follow her. I did. Once we were out of the house and walking up our alley which ran parallel to a very busy street, she told me where we were going. She said, “Mimi will save us from this. She doesn’t know. If she knew, she would stop momma and daddy. We are going to Mimi’s!” Mimi was my father’s mother. She was a small, frail, endlessly loving and sweet person who we both adored. When I heard that was our destination, I was ecstatic. Mimi was my favorite person in the whole wide world. I think she still might be to this day. I don’t think I could have felt more loved by her. I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that she adored us both. She lived in a very large 1950’s ranch style home exactly 2.3 miles up the street. A straight shot, only 1 turn. When I worried we would get lost, She reassured me, she would tell me, “SWAFFER, look for SWAFFER” I myself remember thinking through the fact that we were a 4 or 5 year old, and a 7 or 8 year old walking down the street alone carrying a suitcase with a teddy bear arm dangling out the side. We were going to be noticed. I told her we should probably walk behind the line of small, short trees lining the next block of alley way. So we did. We walked for a very very long time. I remember a grey sedan pulling up beside us, the woman and man calling to us to come to the car. She slips through the trees and walks right up to the car. The woman who spoke with an Arabic accent asked, “Where are you two going?’ She replied, “To our MiMi’s house, we are running away!” The woman smiled broadly and replied, “What a coincidence! WE are going to OUR grandmother’s right now! Do you think we could give you a ride to your MiMi’s and maybe after you two can come meet our GhiGa?” She immediately and exuberantly agreed. She looked back to me, still hiding behind the trees, she extended her hand just like before in the window and said, “Come on! Let’s go!” I wouldn’t budge. My soul was screaming. I couldn’t take a single step toward her, toward the car and smiling strangers. Or to run away in the opposite direction, back to the home I had walked away from because of abuse, but now, in this moment, the fear overtook any of the beatings I ever endured. I shook my head no. I shook it harder. The woman began getting angry, quickly,.. “Just get in the car!” she shouted. It made me more resigned. I refused to budge. My sister yelled at me, “COME ON! WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO WALKKKK!” I screamed back, “NO! I WONT! YOU CANT MAKE ME DO IT!” And with that, the car suddenly sped off, never to be seen again, outside of my nightmares. My sister wailed about how I had messed up such a good thing. As an adult, I see now, I might have saved our lives. We kept walking.

Just curious…I was googling 50 Shades because I remembered how funny it was that the author actually started the book out as a Twilight fanfiction but it turns out not a lot of people find that as amusing as I do😬

Is it illegal to do that or something??😭 I didn’t know that was a bad thing to do in the writing community.

Who am I? she asks. Like a fool. ‘Who am I?’ everyone asks when they come here, what a boring question. Like starting a sunday morning with a cup of black coffee, or  vacuuming the house. I yearn for heroin, the dust. That also makes me fool, right along with them. The snow that is shades of grey. Why don’t we vacuum the snow too? Why is it that dust is rude and unwelcome? Why is dust an intruder while the snow is a blessing? Perhaps because the snow is white, reminding souls of what they lack, innocence. Perhaps it allows them to pretend they are good-hearted like angels, like babies wrapped in shrouds. Snow lies to them, people think snow is kind. What fools! Snow is a liar, so it's comfortable but what about the dust? The dust is blunt, it's honest, it's kind. It is a mirror that shows people what their soul or even what their lungs look like. It reminds them of the cruelties they create and then cry about. Why can we not pretend it is fairy dust, not regular dust? Because if you add the word “fairy” infront of the word it becomes wondrous and magical. However, fairy dust exists in fantasy, whereas dust exists in the real world. The real world is the product of humans, the fools so, of course, any product of the real world will suck. Like dust. ‘Who am I?’ And I think, what answer would satisfy them? ‘You’re special’ I could say. What a futile lie it would be! Special! What a laugh!

the smell of a new car/sun hitting your skin/cinnamon in coffee/water fountains/ creaky wood floors/driving to your lovers house/velvet couches/a pile of books/new perfume/silver rings/blue velvet/small crystals/a scrunchie on a girl’s wrist/faded tattoos/roses/the feeling when your plane touches down/disposable cameras/chipped nailpolish/watching your favorite movie for the first time with someone new/developing film/the smell of antique shops/denim jackets/the sound of a printer/walking up to your door/blue nail polish/home grown peppers/bonsai trees/church basements/the startchy smell of rice/fresh strawberries and chocolate/sitting outside with your friends/the echos on the walls in an empty room/sleeping with the windows open/ritas soft serve/the sound of thunder at night/a manilla envelope/opening up letters/clean glasses/you saying my name