I'll admit it - school was the best time of my life.

I'm someone who mourns the loss of something even when I'm still experiencing it, knowing that someday everything I know and feel in that moment will be gone. So being told that school was being cut short 2 months sooner than I had planned for, it all felt like a dream. Those final few days in the building feel like a blur, everything was suddenly so fast. 

I enjoyed school for what it was, especially being surrounded by my best friends for 6 hours a day, but I never expected to miss every other part. Passing faces of people I barely knew, but would see every day in the hallways, hearing gossip about people I secretly disliked but would never show it, being able to laugh over something stupid one of the boys would do during one of our history lessons. 

My mind is swamped with memories of people I will never see again, despite growing up with them for 7 years. I think being an observer makes all of this even more difficult to accept. Details of strange and unimportant events plague me. I will never need to recite to anybody how a specific biology lesson on a Thursday afternoon in 2018 played out, yet I remember it like it was less than a month ago. 

I'm lucky in a sense, I found a group of people when I was 13 and have stuck to them like glue ever since - never fallen out and every time we see each other it feels as though we are suspended in time, never removed from that little room in the school building that we claimed as our own. I don't know how many people in their second year of University, all attending different schools around the country, have the ability to say that is the case. It gives me a massive sense of comfort, dampening the blow of all I feel when I think about school. But how long will it last? I'd like to tell myself that because it's lasted this long through us being removed, it's bound to stick. That we've passed through the toughest parts, the new friendships people have formed that should have replaced our bonds and didn't. But I just can't trick my brain into fully believing it. I live with fear of that impending grief.

I don't want my life to have peaked at 17, but I'm now 20 and still grasping onto these feelings. It's awfully sad. I don't like it. University doesn't even come close to matching the happiness I felt from 2015-2020. Not at all.

I feel this post doesn't make sense to anyone but me, I can't truly explain the intricacies of how I feel about missing being a teenager in full time education, it's such a strange feeling. I don't know. It'll be okay. :)