Always forward, never back

A short story

Opening the attached puzzle.txt file we're presented with the following short story:

There was a time
has got me wondering,
it's when there were lions up on the street
such a lucid dream.
It was when my mother got me up on
simple street
A deathly place follows...
Challenges came here and there,
has there even been water here?
a time when we had no place or home
like anybody's game is here to show
like anyone's time to go...
edge of town...
nobody's wondering
get up and go cause no one's stopping
engineer a better life
Cause you know you got ups and downs
a bit more to show then these
ultimate clowns
so choose your path
end of the path is when you look back
I look back...
A simple smile stares back at me
my mother and my town looking back at me
But I made my mistake and move on
obvious choice to keep on pushing
random urges to look back again, see where I came from
end of the path, I tell myself
dont look back. always forward, never back...

Extracting the flag

Reading only the first letter of each line we can see they form a sentence, let's write a bash one liner to cut out the rest and put everything on one line:

$ cut -c 1 puzzle.txt | tr -d '\n'

Wrap the output in ictf{} and we have our flag ictf{ThisIsAChallengeCauseIAmBored}.