No matter what you choose in those times of tough decisions, no matter how many choices you have to make in your life, it is inevitable that you will make a wrong one.

What have I learned?

That it's alright, that it's what makes us all "imperfect". That wrong decisions are what open our eyes to the right ones. That one wrong decision doesn't shape the rest of your day, your month, your life. That your wrong decision doesn't have to be someone else's because you have the power to teach, to help and to guide.  That despite it feeling like "the end of the world", it isn't going to be the last time. But that you don't have to live your life regretting everything you did, or didn't do. That moving on isn't disrespectful or rude, but healthy. That the only way you can right those wrongs is get up to do something. Not sit there wallowing in your regrets. 

What have you done that you regret? Or is it something you should've done but didn't? Ask yourself if it can be fixed, is there anything you can do now that will help you? If the answer is "no", you have to craft a big flashing neon sign in your mind that reads "MOVE ON". Maybe you'll want to sit in bed and pull the covers over you head until everyone forgets about you and all the sounds of the world drown away. But your decisions can do good. In fact, just one word out of your mouth, one thought in your head and one step that you take can make another person's day, and save a life.

But what can you do if you're hiding? 

Regrets are impossible to avoid, but they are possible to forget or simply place in the back of your mind. Be someone's right decision and to do so, you have to first forgive yourself.

I'm a strong believe of fate, not because I was pressured and not because of religion, but just by pure random choice.

When I was six years old, like any other wannabe rebellious child, I went to the playground without my parents' permission. There's a broken wooden swing hanging on a long tree branch that they had always forbidden me from touching. But something about its cracked seat and moss covered ropes attaching it to the branch drew me in. I ran up to the tree, panting while the guilt of disobeying my parents started to settle in.

I quickly made a promise to myself that if I could swing on the swing, just once, without it breaking, I wouldn't have to tell my parents about this little trip and they wouldn't be mad. If they were right after all and I did break it, I would confess everything. Looking back, it was a deadly risky decision, but seemed completely fair at the time, and it was a way to counteract and almost erase my guilt. So I swung my legs over the wooden board, feeling the aged, ratty rope in my hands and swung back and forth.

Back and forth, back and forth. It creaked and rattled, staining my clothes and hands but even after about 10 swings it remained strong and sturdy. I ran all the way back home, delighted with myself, and climbed back in through the doggy door, never to tell my parents.

From then on, I believed fate not only existed, but was the core of every action: everything positive and negative. Every once in a while, I tested fate on the most random things. I'd be eating expired yogurt, thinking, 'if this yogurt makes me sick, I will study for my test tomorrow. Otherwise, I'll probably be fine.' There was no correlation between them, nothing that made sense, but it was a way to keep some stability in my life, and probably a way for me to take as little responsibility for my actions as possible. I followed these little rules that I set for myself and it gave me the feeling that I had some control of my life, but that if things didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it wasn't all my fault either.

So right now, I'm sitting on the floor, my English assignments and Physics worksheets still scattered around, making a silent promise to myself.

In the next hour, if I get a notification from my phone from someone I know, even if it's just asking about homework, a simple 'hey', or someone coming into this room, specifically looking for me, this life is worth living a little while longer. Otherwise, I'm simply a waste and should act upon that.

I have to admit, I sort of created this promise in favor of myself. My best friend Clara is not only on her phone practically 24/7 but she accidentally saw the jagged red scars up my forearm less than an hour ago. Granted, she looked at me, pained, and ran away, I know she would never leave something like this unresolved for more than a few minutes. After all, this isn't the first time it's happened and I'm surprised she isn't knocking on my door already. I guess this should mean that I truly do want to live, that dying isn't exactly favorable, but I can't seem to come to that point, not really.

Not wanting to leave any loose ends untied, I send a simple heart to my mom and dad and I do this fairly frequently so they wouldn't find it strange. Then, almost as an afterthought I shoot a quick email to Star, trying to sound as normal as possible. Through our few pen pal emails we've exchanged, and the questions he'd left in his last email, there's that strange undeniable connection between us that makes it just feel a little bit wrong to leave him in the dark. 

To: starstheoryprevails

From: aworkinprogress

Subject: A Work In Progress

Alright, so maybe this pen pal assignment is not "the devil" but I wouldn't call it an angel either. And I was thinking, since I had you explain your username, I might as well tell you mine. 

There's not much behind it, to be honest, just that everyone you talk to, every living, breathing person is a work in progress. Their life is still ahead of them which leaves much room for change. Even if they're on their deathbed, they still have the chance to talk to someone, maybe it's you, and say something that will change the way you think, what you do, so their work is not done yet. We're all just in progress, aren't we? And life will take up on a journey and lead us to our destination, whatever it is meant to be.

- A

ps. Movies and popcorn is a much better date idea than mini golf ;)

pps. No, that is not (too) cliché

I'm pretty proud of the email. If it was published in one of those books recording the last words (or texts, I guess) of a famous person, I'd be pretty pleased with that. And so, I sit back and wait, starting a timer on my phone for one hour. The countdown ticks to 59 minutes, then to 58 and 57. I watch it as it possibly ticks down the minutes of my life, and I wait. I should probably be concerned at how calm I am, because I realize I would be perfectly content with either outcome. 

When it's down to 10 minutes, I've grown restless, but remain in the same position. Clara, where are you? If she doesn't appear, then what? Am I really going to do it? Off myself? End my work even though it should be in progress? Is my story really supposed to be over? I wonder these questions repeatedly until the timer reaches three minutes.

Ding.

I jump up, willing myself not to be too excited because it's very possibly just my professor assigning a new item of homework, which doesn't count. But then, I turn on my phone and read the notification, my heart jumping to my throat in surprise and excitement.

Everyone seems to think in the beginning there was just one: one person, one creature, one thing, me. Sorry to disappoint, but it isn't true. How I wish it were true...

There were others; we were all living separately, but cohesively. In an endless blanket of stars, we were galaxies, we were dreamers, and we were creators. Although I think we were all quite lonely, the thought of communicating seemed impossible. What if you lived in a house and someone told you, all your life, that you couldn't leave? You'd never think to do it, never think it's possible. That's how it was like with us.

We each had our individual galaxies, more individual worlds and somehow, without ever interacting, we lived in harmony. In our galaxies, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful flourishing planets. Trees miles tall sprouted from the ground on some planets, gorgeous rainbow-colored waves flowed in others and winter wonderlands dwelled in others. I could see not only my planets, but those of the that had created the other galaxies. Each was its own unique paradise and it was absolutely perfect. Although I never admitted it, checking in on their new worlds were some of the highlights of my life. Hard to imagine right? Until what you may know as The Big Bang.

Everyone told you that before The Big Bang, it was nothing, right? Not really, as you can tell; things were pretty much utopia. But something happened. The explosion.

It honestly destroyed everything I knew. All of my precious planets, practically my children, were gone. It had all been replaced by... dust. And not the sparkly stardust, it was the ashy gray kinds that reminds me of death.

All of my friends, whom although I never interacted with, I still adored and trusted had somehow vanished. I can only hope and pray they are at least still alive and well.

I was devastated. I spent years, even eras, just drowning in my own failed creations of gray rocks and crumbling stars. I'd pretty much given up.

When I finally decided to just size up, shake it off, and completely start over, I put all of my energy into this one planet. I want to make it perfect: the amazing combination of all of the planet of my past life. I gave it a perfect amount of teal blue oceans, rich green forests and even added pieces of snowy ice valleys and calming deserts. 

I was so proud when it was finally done, when I had finally rounded out all the rough edges, and perfected until I couldn't think of anything else that would make it better. I finally felt happy again.

That's why I decided to add living creatures. There hadn't been any 'animals', as you would call them, in my previous planets. But this one? I wanted countless other beings to be able to enjoy my dream world with me.

Things flourished and everything shined. But only for a short while.

Where did my hundreds of miles of grassy fields go? Replaced by ugly gray buildings. 

Where did my periwinkle blue skies and fluffy clouds go? Covered by masses of choking brown smog.

Where did my wonderfully chill and serene ice caps go? Somehow melted away into the ocean that I had already designed perfectly.

In the world I created, I had somehow also destroyed it.

Now, you heard the story of your planet: my story. Please tell me you can fix it...

Sometimes these thoughts come when I'm crying my eyes out and other times when I'm laughing so hard my stomach hurts.

Would I rather live in an oblivious world, in which I wake when the sun rises and sleep when it falls, isolated and unknowing. Where questions never arise, but then I don't think to question anything at all?

Or would I rather live as I do now? Where I know the ups and downs, the hardships and the opportunities, the hopes that are impossible, the dreams that will never be but also the simplest joys and most complex happiness.

 Note:

~'100 words for thought' series

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<3

Today I passed a girl in the hallway heading towards a presumable friend who had tears falling down her cheeks, clearly in pain.

The girl walked up and the first thing that came out of her mouth was, "How could you kill our snapchat streak? Are we even friends?"

I wanted to yell at her, on the spot, because hello? Your friend is crying and you're accusing her of losing a streak?

What kind of fake world do we live in that causes us to be blinded to true emotion by such unimportantly artificial things? How materialistic have we become?

Note: 

~'100 words for thought' series

~Share, like and follow for more!

On a white light runway, crowded with hundreds of cameras and equipped with crystal fiber fabric. A model struts wearing the newest million dollar designer outfit which might, to the commoner, look like a rag with holes. The new distressed look has become all the rage and this diamond encrusted rag is worn with dignity and auctioned off for wads of cash or displayed in a fashionista museum.

On the opposite side of the world, a little boy sits on the dirt ground. He is skinny, frail and each individual rib bone can be seen through the holes of his shirt. It too contains rips and tears, but the only difference is, they were not purposeful. He licks his cracking lips in an attempt to relive his constantly parched mouth and uses his rag of a shirt to wipe the sweat off of his glistening forehead.

The difference is that he doesn't get to return home to a rose petal bubble bath in a gold flaked bathtub.

Disclaimer: Not meant to discriminate or offend anyone in anyway.

But think about it.

When my younger brother was crowned king of Kaharian, our kingdom and the home we'd known our entire lives, I rejoiced and celebrated with all the proper festivities. My seventeen-year old self was naïve and foolish, thinking that at least one good thing came out of my father's early and cruelly timed death; my brother, Julius, finally got the chance to be what he had always wanted. Though he was only fifteen and had yet passed the proper training to becoming ruler, it was only right that he, the eldest male heir of the throne, would take over the crown. I was just glad I would be there alongside him to support him, smiling in the background of his pictures, guiding him through the procedures of being king since, though I never would've had a chance to be a ruler, watched each of my father's moves more carefully than he did himself.

But that was before... everything. Before my brother fired all of his councilmen, turned our once beautiful city into the rubble of a harsh civil war, and kicked me and my mother out of the palace.

"Power turns the best of us into lunatics", my father had once told me when I was just ten years old while I played around in his royal high chair. I giggled because I thought 'lunatic' was a very funny word and we went about our day. 

But, now, each day, I reflect upon his words again, wondering why in the world I didn't take caution from his warning. They are, at the same time, the reason of my constant despair, but also the spark of my only hope.

Power. It's what Julius had gained too much of, at too young of an age. But it my also be the only thing he has left. I wonder far too often, can he see the destruction he has caused? Perhaps not. But no matter what he has done, no matter how terrible he acts, our unbreakable bond relationship makes me not want him to become a lunatic. Is that insane? 

There have been far too many dictators and tales of fallen kingdoms from a crazy ruler, but now I wonder whether their sisters, their parents, their children, think of them the way the rest of the world does. 

Because I think I'll forgive Julius no matter what he does, yet the thought of him turning into a lunatic because of something I have no control over keeps me sleepless at night.

Yet, I have to also focus on the silver lining of father's words.

Power turns the best of us into lunatics. When I was a little girl, Julius was the 'best of us'. He, unlike any of my friend's brothers, let me practice my hair-braiding skills on his silky hair, and didn't scream at me when my barbie dolls mixed with his superhero action figures. Even though he was always two years younger, he never hesitated to make fist-clenching threats at any of my boyfriends who treated me poorly. So I made a promise to myself, when Julius created the first of the so-called 'Intolerable Acts', that no matter what, I would always remember him at his best, and I would always remember that it was the power which made him the monster he is becoming.

He made 'Intolerable Act I' just a few days after his coronation ceremony. Just days after the flowers and confetti had been cleaned off the streets by our dutiful caretakers, Julius found out that he had the power to regulate commerce and salaries, so to pay for the new marble statue of himself, he cut the caretakers' salaries by nearly half, lower even than the minimum wage. (When his chief advisor informed him of this, Julius fired him immediately and subsequently lowered the minimum wage).

They started out small and irrelevant, but once they started affecting people by the masses, our friends, our family, I realized Julius had gone crazy with power.

With 'Intolerable Act XXIV' to be announced in less than a week, I huddle in the corner of a small hut with my mother, our eyes filled with the same anguish, terror and regret. And the worst feeling in the world is regret with no solution.

#Prosechallenge

Dirt. Sand. Mud. It's streaked across my face and smeared all over my body, seeping through my ripped clothes. The damp air around me already reeks of sweat, blood and death. Never ending shrieks and screams mix with raging battle cries creating a horridly continuous song that will rattles my bones and drains all thoughts of hope out of me. 

Just an hour ago, or maybe it was two, or three, I watched my baby brother get pulled apart, shredded and tossed aside into a growing pile of limbs and rotting flesh, all in a matter of seconds. I'd snatched him out of his crib the minute I saw my mother get eaten alive and my father stampeded to death in our living room. When I fled down the stairs of my apartment and ran into the streets, not breathing and not comprehending, I found that the city I knew of as beautiful New York City was gone and torn apart, already littered with corpses and stormed by evils I had only seen in my worst nightmares. Through my streaming tears and with trembling hands, I hid my brother in a small recycling bin that did nothing for my eighteen year old body but was just enough to conceal him and covered him with cardboard boxes and newspapers from the day before, predicting a sunny and cloudless day today. What a joke.

With what I can only think of as my primal instincts, I fended off the monsters that seemed to pour towards us like a neverending stream of gore, tearing blindly with my hands. They clawed at me with grotesquely long nails and an emptiness in their eyes that scared me so much I had to shut my own closed. Every time their finger scratched my body I resisted the urge to scream in agony as what I can only describe as a trail of hot, burning acid. I don't know how long I fought them off for, because no matter what I did they kept coming back and there was always one to take the place of a fallen. My arms and legs were weaker and sorer than anything I'd ever experienced but somehow I kept thrashing, forcing my limbs to move, to defend my brother. 

To defend my brother, the only family I had left. But when a little cry I knew all too well sounded a few feet in front of me, I snapped my eyes open, barrelled through the wall of zombies in front of me, only to see my brother murdered. By the time I screamed 'I love you' through my hoarse throat, his head had already been snapped off.

At that point, I collapsed onto the ground and the zombies continued their mindless march forward, tossing me around with their feet. I didn't care. Let them kill me. I had given up, every part of my body completely useless. They tossed and turned me for about a block until I was kicked into alleyway, my body heavily rolling down a set of concrete stairs where someone grabbed me and shoved me in a door. 

I'm filthy, worn out and hopeless. Every vein and muscle that ever wanted my pathetic body to survive had given up. I'm writing this with some untapped reservoir of strength that will only last a few more seconds so that people will know, so that they'll understand why I stopped trying. I'm done, and it will only be a matter of time before my corpse is thrown out to join the streets of decaying bodies. 

And all this in a day.