LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: June Edition
by Richard Berwind, Managing Editor
Hello to the LIT community!
June is my birth month, so I find it very fitting that this month I am able to share something that inspires me in my writing and hope that it will inspire yours.
Every year, I find myself crying around the time of my birthday. It comes sporadically; a random insertion of grief and pain on days that should otherwise feel renewing. I spend days on end researching, looking up the who, the how, and the why this phenomenon happens, as if understanding its deepest mechanisms will make the sudden onset of grief roll away into the summer haze.
Astrologically, I was born under a Virgo waxing crescent moon in the sign of Cancer and the hour of Pisces. Psychologically, I was diagnosed with chronic depression at eighteen the first year of undergrad. Culturally, the U.S. has been in a Loneliness Epidemic far before 2020 and the Covid Pandemic, which medically increases risk of heart disease by 29%, risk of stroke by 32%, and risk of dementia by 50%. Historically, I have always been told that my soul is old and yet internally I feel so new that I feel my roots being invaded and crossed by those willing to survive longer. Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine writes, “Some people turn sad awfully young … No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.” And in the show Fleabag, Phoebe Wallers-Bridge writes in the script, “I think you know how to love better than all of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.” This line later paralleled in the dialogue, “I love you! / It’ll pass.”
Yet, I still sit in bars and drink myself stupid with friends. I still buy a new numbered candle to put into a cupcake and sing myself Happy Birthday alone in my apartment. There is still joy in the sorrow as there will always be sorrow in the joy. I think as a queer person, we were always meant to mourn more than our cis-het counterparts. Decades of violence, an entire generation gone in a matter of years, and the continued legislation that outlaws the expression of our trans siblings really contextualizes the magnitude of our experiences in the grander scheme of things. But if you look hard enough, you will always find us: in love, in joy, in secrecy, speaking languages no one else knows. It takes a certain sense of bravery to be able to find love in times of hopelessness. It’s quite the dichotomy to be able to contain these kinds of experiences. I was born on June 28, 29 years after the Stonewall riots and 28 years after the first Pride, a dichotomy. Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, I Saw the TV Glow, ends with perhaps a blessing, or a curse: in glowing sidewalk chalk, there is a simple phrase that states, “there is still time.”
Dear Reader: There is still time.
For June, we would like to prompt you to write about times in which you’ve felt a dichotomy in your history. Equal yet opposite reactions. Crying in the tunnel on the bus home from a party. Feelings of hope in times of turmoil.
