Hazard Home --> Creative Writing --> "Alphabet Writing"
This was written for English. We had to write something with every sentence beginning with the next letter of the alphabet (so the first sentence starts with an "a" word, the second starting with "b", you get the idea). Except two of my friends misunderstood the text, so rather then beginning each sentence, each line was started with a letter, so it would go "A b c d e f..." all down the left side. But the teacher thought that was clever too, so she gladly took it.
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Another good thing in your life, and you screw it all up again. But there's nothing you can do to fix it. Cautiusly you begin a new connection, careful not to mess up that first impression. “Don’t bring up anything to personal,” you tell yourself, “don’t scare them off.” Eventually though something happens, and one way or another, it’s over. Four times out of five it’s your fault; you say something wrong and they don’t want anything to do with you anymore, and they leave. Gone from your life so abruptly, without a word of goodbye, without telling you where you went wrong. Hopefull, you might wait for their return, if you do not yet realize they’re not coming back. You'll wait patiently, hoping they’ll come back and give you a chance to explain yourself and offer an apology. Just when you're sure you have a connection, you run your mouth and screw it up. Keen eyes aren’t regularly needed to see what words of yours were the most likely culprits that scared them away.
Life is futile — a pointless scramble at the next thing that can bring us happiness and distract us from our woes, until that happiness is depleted, and it’s time to scramble for something else to amiliorate the regret and disapointment. Many people enter and leave our lives; sometimes they leave of their own acord, sometimes you leave them without having a chance to tell them — either way someone is left feeling abandoned and wandering why the other won’t come back. “Nothing good lasts forever,” people say. Of course not, it’s easy to see — just screw up a new connection before it’s had time to blossom. Perhaps it’s with a lifelong friend, perhaps with a mentor, or maybe a potential partner; some connections will end quicker than others, but whether it’s you or them, one of you will ruin it all — it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to.
Questions and guilt flood your mind: “What did I say?”; “Why did I even bring that up?”; “Why would I tell them that?”; “Why can’t I keep things to myself?” Resentment fills your heart for those who don't have the decency to tell you why they don’t want to be around you anymore, or to give you a chance to fix it, and who abandon you and leave you wandering. Self-loathing follows close behind — it was you doing, after all. To take inititive and be the one to say “let us explain our perspectives on this, and let us apologize to each other”, however, is just too great a risk; the mere act of trying to reach them at all could make things worse — regardless of what you want to say. Unfortunately, it’s near imposible to not slip up — so dificult to refrain from mentioning things, such as past experiences, too early on, or refrain from bringing it up at all. Very frequently that scares someone into blocking your number on the phone or your username online, or ignoring you in real life. “Why!” you'll want to shout, “Why do I always ruin the mood? Why does everyone reject me without ever expressing to me how I made them feel first?”
Xenial fortune would permit that everyone we met would forgive us for killing the mood, excuse us, and allow that we continue on and move on from the discomfort; or, better yet, if fortune were xenial indeed we would not have such an urge to overshare, and instead find a better, less-discomforting, or even vaguer reason or response. Youth are told by the elders, “Live with no regrets,” but how can anyone who has a soul live without regreting how they have caused others, particuarly loved ones, such arbitrary and ultimately needless pain and discomfort? Zealous bodies often forget to check themselves; even when they think before they speak they underestimate the impact their stories will have on others—they don’t see that impact until they don’t have the chance to repair it.