An exploration of shape. Prose or poetry.

There is a shelf in your house with bottles of all your memories you've wanted to save for later consumption. If you could open one and drink it to relive that memory now, which one would you open.

Write about a time you had to present yourself one way on the outside, but felt completely different on the inside.

So...at least once a week I order Chinese food for lunch. My latest fortune had me laughing, and I thought it would be a fun idea to base a challenge on those little scraps of insight (or amusement). Pick your most recent, favorite or funniest fortune and write away! Or, if you have never had Chinese food or so infrequently that you don't have a cache of fortunes to pick from in your desk drawer like I do, please feel free to use my most recent fortune. "Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair."

Write the longest gratitude you have ever written (which could be one word if you have never written one), or write about the longest gratitude list. Or write whatever else is prompted, I am grateful for your entry no matter what.

Write a love poem to something intangible.

I just read a poem that stopped my heart, and then restarted it again. Has this happened to you? If so, please share the poem in this friendly challenge. Be sure to credit the author.

In between her thoughts and ideas there were words, always words. Never did they drop properly from the tongue, disjointed and self-conscious as they would emerge. But by pen...by pen the words could dance, sing, inspire, emote, play, die, and be reborn. By pen, why, they came alive. By writing, she came alive. And she knew it wasn’t reality but reality-adjacent. Because reality hardly ever approaches one’s own idea of perfection and sometimes, perhaps even oftentimes, her words could. And in that truth lay the tragedy that when she ceased to write, she ceased to live. She ceased, even, to seem alive. This being the case, why would she ever stop writing? I’m certain she could never tell you, and ceasing to write, how could we ever know? If only someone close to her knew her story, and was willing to share it...

You need to be listening to music to do this challenge. I mean, I guess if you have music running through your head, maybe that counts? But my idea was to take a line from the song to which you are listening, and write using it as inspiration, then add another line if it catches your attention, until you feel you are done writing, or until the music ends (I hope the music never ends, but your piece will have to I suppose). Credit the song(s) and artist(s) in your comments and tag me so I don't miss it.

As a parent, I watched my older two children's dreams die. As an individual, I'm not sure I ever gave my dream a real chance to live. Tell me about the dream killers you've encountered. No constraints to form or length. This is the first challenge I am posting so here goes!