In the essence of saving pride, let me now indulge you in my lullaby of thought, a playground of ring-around-tomorrow and a game of tag with yester-year; back when I but knew to crawl. Today it was announced the world was ending. Well, what can you hope for when all the continent's corrupt and all the walls are crumbling, white stones toppling over gray rooftops. We are completely understanding to all error made in rash decision, so long as you stand true to your wrong. And if you believe what I believe, than we are right and you will win and all the rest of them can die. That's the way we do things here, isn't it? But getting back to innocence, where all quiet thoughts corrupt in secret questions and over-drawn meetings and all excuses of bewitching comes from the intoxication of a beautiful word read in the dead of the night; everything in darkness shines under Bella Luna and Bouganvillia have a way of trapping you in their cluthes, breathless by fragile beauty; tragic in their frailty, powerful in their claws. Somehow I managed to escape thy foes and friends. Slowly I descended from their fellowship and walked straight and lone on a path once detoured. But, me thinks, perhaps, there is another way, from which curved and crooked roads meet, once again to fork at the front and my steps fall with paranoia; is that a voice I hear? I feel the presense of a shadow but see it only as it runs away, details blurred, being gone, and to chase after it I do note dare. One goodbye is enough, I think. But have I said goodbye to too many too quickly? Aye, once again I am shadowed by doubt, cloaked in a chaos of the mind where questions run rampant until I am posessed by the destruction of regret and loss of last chances. Where would my face hang in The Portrait Room? And in Emotion Potion, which propriety would I posses? Second hand rose, so used to being second best; am I never satisfied, or is it they who send me back to zero? Speaking of numbers, you'll never guess how far I've been and how many times I've given up. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages, millions and billions of words; saved without purpose, except to check back on and dwell; to wonder what happened, then shrug, "Oh well." Carrie