ABBY STAFFORD, 17

Dear my dedication, Some six months ago, when blooming Spring rose past the cold soil and set my hand in motion, I sat happily with friends beside me. Te air between us was warm like the Summer we’d never have, kept close to our skin as we leant against classroom walls, shoulders pressed together. Sharing, I think, warm cappuccinos to ward of what little wintery spell had choked its way through the brightening sky. Whispers of a far-of storm kept clear through our silly remarks and happy laughs. We wrote, not knowing, all of our experience, our work and our hope into little blinking documents that would never fnd themselves completed. Tere were a lot of things to do: work and study and applications for anything and everything that could take us to our futures. Little did we know.

Because when time paused like that blooming Spring had forgotten its way to Summer, our futures too forgot that every day was still a day in our lives that fell forwards into the wind. And the breeze that took them stayed unforgiving of our crumbling teenage years. But it was fun. It was exciting. Weeks could fy and we were happy to see them leave, to feel the break in pressure as every responsibility charmed itself into vanishing.

We’d been so busy preparing for so many diferent, so many ‘necessary’ things, that to hear our empty schedules from our empty rooms was a breath we could take with us. Somewhere in that timeless void, where the seasons disobeyed the days I’d watched burn out like fames, it became so easy to just – stop. Because as I sat, alone, in a cool kitchen with a churning laptop fesh against the counter, I could see clearly my friends sat across from me, video outlines pressed together whilst I stayed apart. Blinking documents shut their eyes and I closed my writing fst. Lessons too far away to attend lef absent as June fell into July. Work and study and applications for some delayed future could wait, I decided, because if it wouldn’t come then there was no reason for me to go. Hobbies, too: such fckle things. I lef them with the Spring. With nothing to do or see or say to help the time return, it kept on its way. Yet somehow as the seasons return, as Autumn rears its head, I sit again in a classroom with friends whose two metres I cannot tread. Timelessly, the world has changed, and expected me to as well. Deadlines come and I still don’t go, because I think I’ve lost the reason. If everything can stop at will, why would I stay in motion?

Sincerely, A student.