The prompt this time was the five-word free write. For an explanation of this prompt, click here. The words this time were:
Jellyfish Blackberries Green Tributaries Returning 
What I wrote is below.
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Remember this, I tell myself, standing naked in the mirror. I’ve been picking apart my body piece by piece: flabby inner thighs, saggy chest, wrinkly neck, round belly. Remember this. The way you sometimes want a different body, a new body, a better shell.
Remember this in the times the fear rises up inside you like an electrical current: the near head-on collision at Grove and Webster, the rush of adrenaline that made the fist of your heart swell in an instant, the brakes scrape and lock. That moment of I want to live. Remember this as you walk along the edge of the memorial for Orlando, L-shaped, wrapping around the corner of 18th and Castro, a boomerang of beautiful faces—49 of them, all dead—no future now, no way to become parents, artists, nurses, no more bodies to feed or loathe or bring pleasure to on the dance floor with their lovers: no more life to live. Their names written on the sidewalk so they wouldn’t be forgotten. You must remember this.
Remember this body of yours, I tell my future self. The one unmarked by surgical scars, the one that lifts heavy potted plants, carries luggage up frozen escalators, stirs thick cake batter with a sturdy wooden spoon, holds babies who become men and women. When I am pumping my arms and legs on long, winding walks down to 24th Street, or climbing five flights of stairs at the Forest Hill train station, doing a headstand, a backbend, lifting a barbell to my chest: remember this.
When you awaken from a bad dream in a good bed to sunlit blinds, when you sit cross-legged on the floor with old colleagues who know you and love you, when a dog kisses you and climbs into your lap. Remember those dark times when you wanted it all to end—just say it—when you wanted to die, when you wished the suffering was over. Remember this when you come blinking back to life after anesthesia, when you have a drainage tube under your ribs and a catheter in your dick, that you didn’t always know, really, how badly you wanted to live. Not just publish a book or buy a home or climb Machu Picchu, but simply live, share another meal with loved ones, or a birthday cake, grow another flowering plant, or fall in love again.
All the shallow shit just falls away: wrinkles, cellulite, callouses. You’re beautiful as a newborn. You’re whole and present and full of healthy blood. You have to remember this, right here in the mirror. Right here. In the mirror. You have to. Remember this.
The Catalyst 