From Cafe Writing's April Project:

Option Three: Pick Three

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
– William Shakespeare Sonnet #18

Pick at least three of the following eight words, and write a paragraph, scene, flash-fic, essay, blog entry or poem using them. It's fine to change tenses, or pluralize if you want to, but please bold the words you choose.

brag, course, decline, eternal, possession, rough, temperate, wander

---

Dear C---,

It's been a rough course
during those teenage years
when frustration saturated
our muscles and thoughts
like chlorine in ammonia--
the smells of nausea
and bitterness bit
and tingle at the edges
of our eyes, our skin,
and we choked.

We were afraid
of letting go
of each other
(even ourselves),
of hope,
until the letters that suspended
us like a strand of silk broke
in cyberspace.
We lost the meaning
of listening and talking
face-to-face, palm-to-palm.

Now I sometimes wander
through the park during summertime,
seeing children holding hands
and playing ring-around-the-rosy
like a great carousel going faster
and faster and faster and faster
until they all fall down
and not break their crowns
(or legs or arms)
or turn to ash.

But we did,
for the rose you once gave me
in Cupid month
wilted and bruised the next day.
I plucked its petals
and counted the number of times
you love me, you love me not
before it wilted
and crumbled like tissue paper
on my desk.
Using the petals like
a game of chance,
will it p(r)ick 36 as the time when
I will meet you once again?
If so, can I finally say that
all is forgiven,
and we are both free
like the air we breathe
when we face the wild winds
at Galveston or driving off
in a car not ever having
to look back?