With the end of summer comes the end of the season of youth and the beginning of the transition into old(er) age. In this season of maturity, people settle into whom they’re meant to be, whether they attain wisdom and confidence or grieve regrets and losses—or both. Autumn is a time of contemplation, a time to look back on the path you’ve walked so far, so that you know how to prepare for the new chapter in your life.
The theme for Lights on Park Ave Round 25 is aging. Here are the prompts:
A quote about Sophie not feeling self-conscious as an old woman the way she did as a girl from Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Blanche telling Dorothy and Rose that she thought she’d never have a chance of being happy again before befriending them in The Golden Girls
A quote about only being able to learn about the impermanence of bad things when you reach a certain age from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
“When You Were Young” - The Killers
Murphy telling Joseph that she’s now the same age as he was when he left Earth on his mission in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)
“Twenty-Five, Twenty-One” - Jaurim
“When We Were Young” - Adele
Mia and Sebastian acknowledging what they meant to each other and how they helped each other achieve their dreams before going their separate ways in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016)
Salvador discovering a letter from the older boy he tutored and had a secret crush on as a child by chance decades later in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019)
A gifset of Céline asking Jesse if he can put up with her for 56 more years and a glimpse of their life as a couple after being together for a decade in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013)
Wiktor and Zula deciding to die together after decades of love, heartbreak, separation, and hardship in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018)
Photos of an old Taiwanese couple styling themselves in the clothes that customers at their laundromat left behind
An excerpt about being all the ages you used to be at the age you are now from “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros
Round 25 will end on September 30, 11:59 PM ET (what time is that for me?).
As always, you’re free to jump in whenever you’d like during the round, a wide variety of work types is accepted, and there are no minimum work requirements. Unfinished works and works for other fandom events are allowed. You can find more information about Lights on Park Ave and the participation guidelines here.