Weekly Prompt: Laps Around the Sun

We’re celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.

Welcome to the next weekly challenge for the monthly theme:

The aim of this month is to celebrate all the important moments in our lives. Despite the challenges this year — or because of them — we need to celebrate.

In this first prompt, we celebrate the cycles, the laps around the sun, our journeys with Apollo. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries.

Although this is Paul’s idea, I celebrate my wedding anniversary and my brother’s birthday one after the other this month on the 21st and the 22nd.

When we were planning our wedding, it seemed like a fun coincidence to get married the day before my best man’s birthday.

It was a Wednesday of fine weather with rain clouds that danced over us without lingering. A day when I’d written two versions of my groom’s speech, weather depending.

But now there’s an odd tension between those two days, which one do we celebrate, which one do we holiday away for?

An obvious situation now, but it didn’t occur to us then. But choices made, once behind us, are set in stone.

My brother’s birthday has, since he was a child, been bittersweet. Being on the 22nd, it was ever so close to the 25th and that famous birthday. The poor sod. He often got a combined gift — a tragedy when you’re young.

Now we’ve all cancelled our birthday presents, and it’s our kids who get them instead. What adult needs another adult to guess their minds when they can just order it during their work lunch break? It sounds a bit Grinchy, doesn’t it?

Birthdays and anniversaries are special things, they’re like ‘holidays’ peculiar to your family, the mix and arrangement determined by luck, love and a few good parties.

We have an amusing clustering of birthdays down South.

Our longest patch of summer school holidays comes now in December and nine or ten months later there's a huge swatch of birthdays.

Mine included.

Ending the year with a bang made me the person I am today.

I think we know in our small circle at least nine or ten family members or close friends (and I’m probably forgetting a few) born in September.

It feels like we’re singing every day.

What birthdays or anniversaries come to mind for you?

Good or bad? What do they mean to you? What emotions to they stir up? Use that in your story to as Hemingway meant, “write what you know.”

Challenge Requirements

Your story must:

1. Tells us a story with an anniversary or a birthday somewhere in it.
2. Be min 500 words exactly, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio / links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
3. Be fictional, even if it includes factual information or concerns.
4. Use “Birthday” as one of your five tags.
5. We recommend Fiction, Flash Fiction and maybe your genre too. But it’s your choice.

Example Story:

First published story for this prompt goes here.