Day 13 - Write about your aftershock

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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On Saturday we sold over £700 of magazines at the Poetry Society’s Free Verse Poetry Magazine and Book Fair. Wild. I am so grateful.

It only seems natural then today that we should write about our aftershocks. Maybe it wasn’t one dramatic event, but a whisper: a decision made quietly in a kitchen, a missed call, a door left open. Aftershocks often disguise themselves as small things until we feel the weight of them shifting our whole lives. How did it move through you?Did it rattle the windows of your certainty? Did it open a new fault line inside you — one you’re still learning to live beside? What colour would your aftershock be?Maybe a bruised purple, a pulse of deep blue, a flash of impossible red. Trust the first colour that rises — it knows something. And finally: what changed that day?Change doesn’t always look like fireworks. Sometimes it’s a new silence, a new tenderness, a decision to begin again — or to never go back.

Whatever you do - I want you to map the cracks, trace the stillness, find the reason you chose to survive.

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