The streets that raised us have remained faithfully untouched by time; the sidewalks remain unchanged, and the same ancient trees still cast their familiar shade each June. Beneath their branches linger the echoes of afternoons long gone, when we laughed until tears slipped from the corners of our eyes and debated the color of the living room in the apartment we swore we’d share. We were so certain of our adulthood together, never dreaming that by the time we finally arrived there, we would be speaking entirely different languages, or not speaking at all.

Now, I sit alone on the concrete bench where we used to talk about the future. The sun has been resting on it all afternoon, and its warmth seeps through my clothes until my thighs burn against the stone. From here I can see your front door, and if I turn my head ever so slightly, two doors to the left of yours, I can see mine. Staring at your doorstep through the June haze, I wonder if you remember the other kind of warmth – the one we only recognised as precious after it had already gone cold.

As the warmth of the bench settles beneath me, I imagine looking up to find you walking towards me, and suddenly there you are, sitting next to me, asking if I’d like to spend the afternoon together. For a fleeting moment, I might even believe we could recover the warmth we once carried so effortlessly, that we could finally thaw whatever still grows cold between us whenever our paths happen to cross.

“You look different,” I would say, noticing your longer hair and sharper features.

“Well, we aren’t kids anymore,” you would answer, looking back at me with eyes I no longer know how to translate.

The afternoon would be heavy with questions we already knew the answers to. Because here, people are never far enough away to completely disappear. We share the same friends, the same places, and somehow we continue to hear about each other’s lives without ever truly being part of them. I wonder, sometimes, if that proximity is exactly what made us irrecoverable. Had we disappeared completely from each other’s lives, perhaps there would still be room for curiosity. Perhaps if we hadn’t watched from a distance – listening to how easily found new people to fill the spaces we once held for each other – the thought of returning to each other wouldn’t feel so utterly impossible.

Maybe then, sitting on this bench amid the familiar noise, I wouldn’t find myself wondering whether you came back because you wanted to, or because your mother had finally convinced you to reach out. Because beneath all the careful politeness, we both know things will never be the same. We have returned to this moment before, trying to revive the sprawling afternoons of our past summers, only to learn that the only warmth left between us belonged to the weather.

When I stepped back inside my house, my mother would ask how you were doing, distilling the whole afternoon into a quiet, “You have just grown apart.” As if that could suddenly make me forget the way you used to walk through my front door without even knocking.

And I don’t think I have ever told you this, but sometimes I wish we had suffered a terrible falling out. I wish one of us had done something unforgivable, something that would have left behind the heavy armor of anger instead of this unprotected longing. I wish I had cried, shouted, or physically broken something between us – anything that might have drowned out the bittersweet ache that returns every time our paths cross.

Because if that had happened, you wouldn’t have become the indelible mold of what I believe friendship is supposed to feel like. I would have stopped looking for the warmth your past version gave me in every new person I welcomed into my life.

Maybe I would have learned much sooner that I will never find you in another person.

Not even in you.

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But I couldn’t.

Now, every time I’m back in my hometown, all I do is look over my shoulder, scared someone from my past will appear, and I’ll have to pretend I am no longer the same shy girl who faded into the background after graduation. In those moments, I desperately wish I were back in my college town, wrapped in the comforting anonymity of a place where nobody notices me.

Strangely, though, when I am actually back in college, I find myself searching in a sea of strangers, mistaking them for the very people I left behind. I quietly wish I would run into them. So much so that I’ve rehearsed the conversation plenty of times in my head: “What a surprise, what are you doing here?” “Yeah, I’m actually studying here.” “Beautiful city, I know.” Just enough to prove that this city actually changed me.

Yet, I know that will never happen. And if it did, I would freeze, pretend I didn’t see them, and change sidewalks.

So what do I even want? I don’t even know. It changes depending on which version of my past I am mourning today.

I wish I could say that if all my fears were magically cured tomorrow, I would finally step into the happy, vibrant version of myself I’ve spent a lifetime dreaming of. I wish I could wear my past struggles proudly, like badges of honor. Because what am I, if not the accumulated grief of all the things I never had?

But the truth is that I’m simply scared.

I am scared to admit that most of the things that keep me awake at night happened precisely because I was lost in my thoughts, rather than anchored in reality. I am afraid to confess that my deepest wounds cannot be healed by a new zip code or a change of scenery; they can only be healed by me. I am not running from the past, nor am I afraid of the future. I am terrified of the present. Because I have built my entire existence around the grief of what could have been, choosing to mourn a phantom life instead of simply standing here and living the one I have.

That inability to stay in the moment is exactly why, three years later, I still cannot process my grandfather’s death. While he was alive, I squandered my time worrying that he could die any day. And when he finally did, I spent my time grieving the fact that I hadn’t been present while he was here, instead of grounding myself enough to actually mourn his passing. I didn’t even attend his funeral. I avoided it, hoping that if I didn’t look, I wouldn’t have to face the finality of his absence.

I thought I was protecting myself from a bad time. Instead, I sentenced myself to a lifetime of regret.

In fact, I avoid the present so much that the moment I sit in a therapist’s chair, I instinctively pretend the weight is gone. I swallow the words I am not okay. Instead, I hide inside the future. I obsess over what could happen, convincing myself I am terrified of tomorrow because it is easier than admitting I am drowning in today.

It is suffocating – this constant spiral, knowing that my refusal to just sit here is exactly what is ruining me. But instead of fighting the current, I passively crave a saviour. I just want someone to walk in and pull me out of it, even though I know the relief would never last.

And the hardest part to admit is that even knowing all of this, I won’t stop.

Tonight, I will still lie in bed, drift back into the past, and wrap myself in the familiar ache of what could have been. Because longing for what I don’t have is so much easier than the terrifying responsibility of saving myself. I will close my eyes and convince myself, yet again, that my cure lies somewhere else – quietly mourning a life I am simply too afraid to sit here and feel.

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Then, in daylight, I would work hard to become their friend, to become someone worth keeping. All for the hope that love would stop feeling like folklore.

So you could say I was prepared. I had rehearsed it endlessly, that version of me who was loved, the version of me who was easy to talk to, chosen without hesitation. I had imagined everything — except reality. For when it finally brushed against my life, it did not feel like the stories I had spent years building in my head.

It felt like humiliation.

It was almost a decade ago. He was a boy who existed only within the three-month span of summer school, and yet he knew the shape of my secrets better than the people who watched me survive the winters. That changed, however, when we reached that strange age where people stopped believing boys and girls could simply be friends. Suddenly, every glance, every conversation became something for others to talk about. I thought it was ridiculous at first — harmless, even. The kind of joke you laugh off without thinking twice about it.

But instead of laughing with me — or denying it — he sat me down one day and told me we could not be friends anymore. Not because of a fight. Not because I had hurt him. But simply because the idea of people thinking he liked me embarrassed him enough that he would rather lose me than let them keep talking.

Just like that, in three minutes, he took three summers worth of trust and turned them into nothing.

To twist the knife, a week later, he started dating my best friend, who eventually stopped speaking to me too.

They say we remember actions long after we have forgotten the people behind them, and that something often seen as insignificant can change everything. I know that is true because I no longer remember his face – but I remember how I felt. I remember the sharp, ridiculous embarrassment of it. I remember myself frozen on that bench, feeling something inside me shrink. For it is one thing to be unloved; it is another thing entirely to realise that the very idea of someone loving you can make them feel ashamed.

In fact, I became so haunted by that boy from summer school — who, by the time I reached high school, I had already forgotten the name of — that I decided my love would never be seen again, that the people who lived inside my monthly dreams would never be given the chance to exist outside of them. Because if someone I never even loved could leave me this heartbroken, imagine what someone I truly loved could do to me.

Now, years later, I think back to all the people I once swore I loved — the ones I reshaped myself around — and wonder if it was ever really romance at all. Or if, deep down, I was only trying to undo what that boy from summer school made me believe about myself: that loving me was something people would feel the need to hide, something they would grow embarrassed of once others noticed.

Maybe all I ever wanted was proof that someone could choose me openly, without shame.

I realise now that it never hurt this much simply because they did not love me back. It hurt because, every single time, I cared in ways they never did. And every time someone pulled away from me, it felt less like losing a person and more like confirming the same fear I have carried ever since that summer: that I will always love more deeply than I am loved in return.

So in reality, do I crave love, or do I crave to be someone’s first option — someone’s everything?

If you asked me, I would probably say I crave love because it’s less embarrassing to pretend I never really put myself out there than to admit that all I ever did was stand still and take the slow, familiar stab of people I once swore I loved.

Because after all this time, I am still waiting for someone to prove wrong all the things the people I once loved made me believe about myself.

But would anyone be willing to do that, really?

Or am I destined to turn into poetry every interaction with people who underappreciate my love?

Because, despite people trying to tell me once and once again that I am worthy of being loved deeply, I’ve grown deaf to praise and painfully aware of my own faults. So much that, even in my own dreams, I have become the flaw in the very thing I have spent my whole life yearning for.

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When she is in front of the mirror, she traces each line as though her touch could smooth her skin back in time. And every time I catch her gently pulling her skin taut, I ask myself:

How can something that shows how many times you’ve laughed be something you want to erase?

Truly, I have never understood why people fear wrinkles, when they are only proof that time has been kind enough to let us stay. Nor the uncanny obsession of surrendering expression for youth – of willingly smoothing your face into such stillness that even tears, whether shaped by joy or sorrow, can no longer be told apart.

No one shames a tree for its rings. No one looks at a mountain and insists it return to the shape it held centuries ago. And yet, when it comes to ourselves, we resist the natural imprint of time. It feels strange, almost illogical, to treat aging and the signs of it as failure, when it is the one thing every one moves towards without exception. We forget, far too easily, that while growing up is inevitable, the privilege of growing old is a gift often withheld.

But wrinkles are never merely lines that show a life well lived, within them dwells the aging of our parents, the absence of grandparents, the sudden awareness that time continues whether we are ready for it or not. Because aging is never ours alone; it is a shared witness, a reckoning with the lives of those we love. One of the first times we truly feel it is not when we notice our own reflection changing, but when our parents – once so unshakable, as if made of iron – begin to lean on us, or simply stop growing old alongside us.

And yet no one seeks Botox to ease that sorrow, because no injection can slow time or return the people we miss. What we try to erase are not the meanings, but the marks themselves – the visible evidence that time has touched us. We are not afraid of what wrinkles symbolise nearly as much as we are afraid of seeing the symbols at all.

It feels almost ironic that medicine has worked so hard to extend our lives, only for us to feel ashamed of the proof that it succeeded, because there are ages people reach now that many never dreamed of a century ago – entire decades once out of reach now lived without question.

We have gained years humanity once dreamed of, and still we apologize for carrying them on our faces.

But all of this still doesn’t stop my mother from looking in the mirror and searching for what she thinks she has lost. I wish she could see what I see: that every line carries a memory her face refused to forget. Because the real tragedy is not growing old, and showing it. The real tragedy is never being given the chance to.

So Mom, I tell you this because today is your sixtieth birthday – the milestone you spent so long trying to outrun. Because I want you to know that the age you try so hard to hide is nothing to fear. It is made of every morning you chose to keep going, every quiet sacrifice you never named, and every love you gave that changed someone, even when you could not see it.

So today, I do not celebrate the years that have passed.

I celebrate that you are still here to carry them, that your face bears the joy of a life I was never there to live. And how lucky I am to witness the rest.

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I grew up thinking it was a blessing, no matter how lonely I felt playing with dolls by myself, because I had people to look up to. It was only much later that I started craving someone around my age, a witness to my small days. I wondered what it was like to have parents who hadn’t already spent twenty years raising children, parents who weren’t quietly tired of it in some ways. What it was like to be part of the stories your family tells on Christmas Eve – the crazy things your parents used to do with your brother and sister but would never do with you.

While other children craved freedom from their parents, I craved their attention.

At just ten, I became an only child in a haunted house, where the ghosts of my siblings appeared whenever their newer, more exciting lives became too much – my brother discovering the world, my sister building a home with someone else. I would watch them come and go, a question unfurling somewhere deep within me, “How are you already leaving to find your lives when I haven’t even had time to dream of my own?” I wanted to ask them, but the question never made it past the quiet of me.

Then my loneliness slipped through the summers that followed, until those long days alone began to feel like a kind of hell, turning what should have been every child’s best months of the year into three long months of mornings that felt more worth sleeping through than waking for.

And yet, like every other child, every birthday came with the same words: “You’re growing too fast.” They left me with the feeling that I alone was moving forward, that I alone was racing toward an age where my thoughts and feelings would finally be taken seriously. I was so fixed on reaching it that I failed to notice something simple: I wasn’t the only one growing older.

My parents were too. And far more quickly than I had imagined.

Maybe that’s the curse of being the forever little child – realising, too late, that time has always been moving faster than you thought it was.

Now, my friends speak of losing grandmothers, while I never had one to lose. And there is a quiet knowledge that my children may never have one either. Because time is already visible in smaller things; in the faint crackling in my mother’s eyes even when she doesn’t smile; in the way my father – whose hair I had never seen without its dusting of grey – is suddenly always home, his hands at rest, his time no longer promised to labour.

All of this happening just as I have barely begun to live the life I once dreamed of.

Only now, as the daughter who lives seven hundred kilometers away – the one who misses birthdays, small celebrations, ordinary evenings – do I begin to see it clearly. I realise that I never truly envied the stories my siblings shared with our parents, those wild, cherished memories that return each year as family folklore.

What I envied was time.

Because my siblings will always have had more of it. A whole decade more. And they were able to step into their twenties without carrying the quiet guilt of distance, without feeling that every moment away was something slipping through their hands.

But time does not pause simply because a daughter feels too young to ask her parents to grow old more slowly.

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But this summer feels different.

It’s my last summer before my final year of college – the last one where I can still say, “I have time.” After this, there’s no more buffering space – just a final step on the stairs. And I thought I had finally outgrown the trembling that came whenever someone asked, “What do you want to become?” I thought time had steadied my hands. But it hasn’t. I can feel it again.

Because I assumed being in my third year meant I had figured something out. And yet, despite being so close to holding an actual degree in my hands, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life.

It isn’t for lack of dreaming – I’ve never struggled with that. I spend most of my days wondering what will become of my life, asking myself what I am going to be, who I am going to become. The problem is that I spend so much time longing for all the lives I could live that I end up not becoming anything at all.

I’m terrified of the quiet conformity of time sweeping my countless dreams away – of the aftermath of what once felt like endless procrastination. Because I want to be so many things all at once. I want to live in cities I’ve never seen, study subjects I’ve only brushed my fingertips against, become versions of myself that only exist in daydreams.

I have so much curiosity and too much ambition for my own good. I want to become a neuroscientist who helps cure diseases. I want to pursue creativity and become a poet whose words echo through other people’s daily lives. I want to become a teacher whose name is spoken at graduation ceremonies. I want to be so kind that it radiates off my skin, so open-minded that no one is afraid to tell me anything, so optimistic that I can always make someone feel better.

I want to, I want to, I want to

But instead of trying anything, I’m here pouring myself into old notebooks, looking back and forward for the right answer, knowing that deep down I always knew what I wanted to try first. I just kept avoiding it.

Because I could try, I could give my whole heart into it, but what if my effort becomes nothing? What if my words reach no one? What if I discover that I was better in my imagination than I ever was in reality? What if I spend my life haunted by the paths I didn’t take?

Nothing but what-ifs.

But deep down, what I’m most afraid of is waking up one day and realising I spent years waiting to feel ready for a life that was already waiting for me. That I had become an expert at dreaming and a stranger to doing.

That’s what frightens me the most, even if I hate to admit it.

Not that I’ll fail.

But that I’ll look back one day and realise my life didn’t collapse or explode or fall apart – It simply passed me by while I was busy wondering what it could have been.

I’m scared of becoming the bartender whose eyes linger a second too long toward a weekend-full stage while he pours the perfect Guinness – the one everyone trusts, the one who never leaves. Only for him to lie awake each night imagining his face beneath warm lights, his name printed somewhere he will never stand. Realising, too late, that no door had ever been closed – he just had never had the courage to turn the handle.

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“I don’t imagine you with a boyfriend” someone said. I don’t even remember who, but it was definitely someone who probably never expected to colour the corners of everything I tried to believe about love, about desire, about what I might deserve. But it did.

I turn that sentence over in my head like it belongs to me. It repeats until it sounds true. Not seeing myself with anyone slowly became believable, and for a long time, it was. My reason was that I wasn’t in the right mental state for a relationship, that I couldn’t handle being emotionally available. Now I think it was just a disguise for how much I yearned to feel loved. To fascinate someone in the same way people fascinate me.

It’s easier for people to imagine I had never cared than to see the longing I carried quietly. I hid it so well, and in doing so, they began to think I was unlovable. Eventually, I started to believe it too.

Fiction romanticises this kind of independence – a woman untouched by love, fluent in solitude, free to chase her dreams without needing anyone beside her. As if I chose this life. As if I woke up one morning and decided I didn’t need love. As if independence were a crown I lifted onto my own head and wore proudly.

But that isn’t the truth.

The truth is that I’m so lonely.

Too fucking lonely it hurts.

So I joke about it. Constantly. I turn it into something light, something dismissible, something no one has to sit with for too long – until the joke stops sounding like a joke, and I can’t remember when it stopped being funny.

And still, when I should be sleeping, I lie awake and ignore everything I tell myself during the day. I think about whether there’s someone out there for me, or whether I was simply meant to feel this way forever. I imagine myself as the protagonist who, after years of solitude, learns that independence doesn’t cancel love, that strength doesn’t mean solitude, that her moment is still coming. As everyone says, it comes when you least expect it.

So every night, at midnight, I hide my sword, put on my prettiest garments, and lie in bed. I let everything I’ve been telling myself all day pour back into me – every doubt, every belief I’ve learned to swallow – until it starts to feel like venom. I drink it slowly, hoping someone might notice I’m the one poisoning myself, even though I never leave the room I’ve locked myself in.

And while I wait, I pray to God that if I was meant to be a warrior, meant to be alone forever, He would just take away my desire to be loved.

Because if He keeps His silence and the venom reaches my heart, then in my rotting casket, the only thing the worms will taste is how much I yearned to be loved the same way I loved.

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The newspaper called it a tragedy: a young woman’s life taken by a drunk driver in the early morning. But that young woman had a name, a family waiting for her to come home for Christmas. At my funeral, my family said that I brought life to those around me, that I had lived fully. But I died thinking my greatest contribution to my time on Earth had been wasting it all.

I didn’t quite believe it until I saw my name carved into marble, placed between so many others each carrying the words Your family never forgets you. Dried flowers pressed against those stones, while mine bore enough fresh flowers to gift every forgotten soul. I always thought life was eternal – maybe not endless, but long enough to leave things finished. Long enough to end the conversation I postponed until we saw each other again, or the page mark left mid-chapter.

As I left the newly carved stone with my crumbling parents beneath it and made my way to heaven, the things that once kept me awake at night shrank into grains of nothing, and the mundane things I never noticed grew unbearably heavy. The first person I saw was an old lady dressed in white, who looked sad seeing someone this young climbing through the clouds. When I arrived where she was, she asked me only one question.

“Would you try again at living?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’d do it a little differently.”

“How differently?” she asked, as if she already didn’t know the answer.

“I’d appreciate time. I would make sure other people knew how much I loved them; I would study the degree I was passionate about, not the one that made me feel below average; I would stop yearning for time while wasting it; I would make sure to document each laugh, each kiss, each goodbye.” The tears were running before I was aware of them. “I didn’t know you could cry in heaven.”

“We all start that way, sweetie,” she said. “We also grieve our own death, but that only means a life well lived.”

“Birthday Blues” - the sadness, loneliness, or emptiness some people feel around their birthday, often caused by nostalgia, unmet expectations, or reflections on time passing.

I have to remind myself that I’m only fifteen sometimes, which is strange, because I’m not fifteen anymore.
Yesterday was my twentieth birthday.

Twenty whole years since I’ve been in this world, and when I look back, all I can see are my what ifs. A list of things I haven’t achieved — how I’ve never lived the teenage experience, and how I’ll never get to live it now, because that stage of my life is over. I can’t go back. Never. No matter how much nostalgia tries to push the clock’s hands, time will never move backwards.

I wonder if turning twenty will finally let the ghost of my fifteen-year-old self rest. That girl who sobbed on bathroom tiles, convinced life must get better because it couldn’t possibly stay like this. I wonder if she’ll stop tapping on my ribs, or if she’ll always linger like a shadow I can’t outgrow. And then I think about the eight-year-old version of me instead. The one who believed growing up meant becoming magic, who woke up for Christmas with breathless joy, who thought birthdays were surprises and sparkles and love that arrived without asking. I don’t know where she went. I don’t know if she’s asleep or gone, or waiting for me somewhere I haven’t looked in a long time.

They say a girl who hates her birthday is just a child who once wanted to be surprised — a cake in the dark, a pair of arms waiting for her. Maybe that’s true. These days, I hang my own decorations, light my own candles, whisper my own wishes. I tell myself this is adulthood — the art of pretending you don’t mind being alone. Yet every year, I still hope someone will remember without being told. That someone, somewhere, might think I’m worth celebrating.

But last year, I couldn’t bring myself to throw a party and pretend others had planned it, so we went to a restaurant instead. The noise around me felt distant, all the laughter and clinking glasses blurring together until my eyes drifted to the empty chair where my grandfather should have been. That’s when the tears started — slipping down before I even felt them. My family kept talking, passing plates and stories across the table, and I sat there with them but not really with them. That birthday marked another age he never got to see — a reminder that for him, I will always be seventeen.

Candles melt faster when you realise they’re burning on every table, not just yours. Every year I turn older, the people I love do too, and the idea of losing chairs at the holiday table hurts more than aging ever could. I used to think fear of time meant fear of wrinkles or responsibility; now I know it means fear of absences.

So in that restaurant, while everyone I loved chatted around me, my grief felt louder than their laughter. I always expect the day to wrap around me like warmth, like proof I belong to somebody’s heart. But instead, it becomes a reminder of how easy it is to feel invisible, even in a room full of people singing your name.

I twisted it into something cruel. I told myself their silence was disgust, their politeness was pity. I’d laugh at how hard I tried to blend in, acting like I wasn’t still aching to be seen. But underneath that laugh there was always this emptiness, and eventually I’d sink back into that quiet kind of sadness — the sort that doesn’t make a scene, it just hangs around and weighs on you. And then it would start again. Round and round, like a song with no ending. A squirrel in a wheel, but slower. Sadder.

Some days, I’d swear I was fine, like maybe today’s weight was just weather. Like numbness wasn’t the thing I knew best — as if numbness wasn’t one of the worst fates a person can feel and still be breathing.

Some people turn sad too early. Not because of one great tragedy, but because something about them was always tender. They bruise quicker, dream harder, cry easier, and carry memory like it’s sewn to their ribs. They don’t mean to, they just do. Like sadness grew up with them.

I think maybe it’s true what they say: pain finds the people who feel too much. Maybe a deep heart is a kind of lightning rod. And maybe the ones meant to hold the most beauty also have to hold the most ache.

Or maybe I’m just being dramatic again. Honestly, I don’t know. My brain is tired and I refuse to emotionally analyse myself any further today.

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But the truth is, it isn’t the leaving that hurts the most.

It’s the first time you come back. And it hits like a slap to the chest.

The house smells the same, but it doesn’t feel the same. The laughter, the dog barking, the smell of breakfast—it all crashes over you at once. The life you left behind isn’t yours anymore. So close, so familiar, and yet impossibly out of reach. You realise what your life used to feel like—and how it will never be the same again. The house that once held your whole world becomes just a stop along the way. All the warmth, all the love, fills you with ache. This place isn’t home anymore and I could never replicate what I had anywhere else.

Then, when you leave, it comes—that quiet moment at the airport—the crash of realisation, the thought you try to push away: I don’t want to leave again.

I still remember the first time I saw someone from my family after I left. It had been a month—the longest I’d ever gone without seeing their faces. My brother was in a nearby city for work, and he stayed an extra day just to spend time with me. We wandered around for hours, and all those little things that used to annoy me—the teasing, the arguing—now just made me smile.

The girl who once complained about walking too much could have walked forever that day.

When it was time to say goodbye at the train station, my throat burned from holding back tears. The second he turned away, I broke down. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed with a message: “We miss you too.”

The independence I once craved so badly suddenly felt so heavy, so lonely. I had left an island behind and moved to a city that doesn’t know the sea, and somehow that made the distance feel larger— as if I were living in another country, another life. The sea had become a border I couldn’t cross without missing something on either side.

Now, when I go home, the living room that used to be too loud to sit in has become my favourite place. It’s quiet now, steady and familiar, the hum of comfort in the walls. Somehow, it feels more like my old bedroom than any place I’ve lived in since.

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That’s why I don’t think of absence as empty anymore. Even when people leave, they’ve already planted pieces of themselves that keep growing in us. Maybe that’s the point of loving anyone at all: you let them shape you, and you keep those shapes even after they’re gone.

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably standing at the threshold of something you’ve been waiting on for as long as you can remember: college. For years it was just a word, a distant idea passed from mouth to mouth—your friends whispering about applications, your family asking questions, your teachers reminding you that “the future” was coming. And suddenly, here you are. On the brink.

Your last year of high school. Strange, isn’t it? It feels like yesterday you walked through those doors for the first time, nervous about the unknown, about a life you’d only glimpsed in TV shows. Now those same doors are almost behind you. Time has a cruel way of moving quickly just when you wish it wouldn’t. I know that feeling too well. I remember when college seemed like a far-off blur on the horizon, and now here I am, beginning my third year. Even writing that feels unreal.

When I was where you are, I was afraid. Afraid of stepping forward, but also afraid of letting go. Afraid of leaving behind the room that had grown with me, the posters on the wall, the quiet certainty of home. Until one day I realised something that struck me hard: my room will always be eighteen, but I won’t. We used to grow together, and then suddenly, I kept growing while it stayed the same. That’s the strange ache of growing up—outgrowing the spaces that once held you.

And yes, it’s true: you’ll miss birthdays, the clatter of dinner at your family’s table, the milestones of younger siblings, the everyday moments you once thought would last forever. Life will never be exactly the same again, but different doesn’t mean gone. The people who matter will stay, even if in a new way. You won’t talk to your childhood friends every day, but when you do, it’ll feel deeper, more real. Your conversations will shift too—not just about the same classrooms and teachers, but about new places, new classmates, new lives. Each of your friends will carry fresh stories and people into their world, and when you come together, it feels like all those lives are gathering at the same table.

I won’t lie to you—change is terrifying. It creeps in slowly, disguised as a new class or a new city, or it hits all at once, like leaving the home you’ve always known. But I’ve learned, sometimes painfully, that change is not just a part of life—it’s the engine of growth. And as much as I hate growing up, I also dream of becoming what my grandfather once was to me: that old man who seemed to have lived a thousand lives, who carried more stories than he had time to tell. That kind of richness only comes from saying yes to change, from choosing to move forward instead of hiding from it.

Because you know what scares me more than change itself? Missing the people, the moments, the experiences that could stay with me forever—simply because I was too afraid to take the chance. One of the things that makes us truly mature is the experiences we live. And what experiences can we have if we’re frozen, clinging to the past? Staying stuck doesn’t just make you miserable—it keeps you from growing. Your friends will move forward, your world will change, and if you resist, you’ll be left behind, watching life happen without you.

Change is inevitable. Everyone experiences it, and yes—it sucks. We all hate it. But let me ask you this: don’t you hate even more the thought of yourself in ten years, looking back and realizing all the life, all the laughter, all the opportunities you lost simply because you were afraid?

I know you’re scared. It’s normal. I was too. But the truth is, we never stop growing up. Sometimes I wish we could pause, freeze time at an age when everything felt familiar. But then I think—what would I have lost if I stopped growing at seventeen? The friendships I never would have made, the lessons I never would have learned, the strength I never would have found. And while my college life hasn’t looked like the polished version I once saw on TV, it has given me something better: a chance to grow into myself, to become someone I would never trade for who I used to be.

So my final tip is this: focus on your last year of high school. College will come, but high school will never come back—except in memories. So enjoy it while it lasts. Laugh with your friends, collect those ordinary days, and let the next chapter arrive when it’s ready. The laughter you share now will echo far longer than you expect.

With warmth,	
Ana Del Mar

I studied myself the way someone studies a script, revising my words, softening the edges of my voice, choreographing my gestures until they seemed right. Every morning I put on a costume—something safe, something no one would question. I painted expressions across my face like makeup: a smile here, a nod there. Even when I was alone, I stayed in character.

Even in my journals, I edited myself as if someone else might read them one day. I noticed the rhythm of my steps on the pavement, the exact way I laughed at a story I didn’t find funny, the way I phrased things so as not to offend or disappoint. On quiet nights, I would sometimes scroll online, glimpsing stray opinions about plays or stories, barely registering them—a faint reminder that the world’s judgment existed, even if it was distant and irrelevant.

For years I thought there would be a payoff. If I played the role well enough, delivered every line with care, eventually the curtain would rise and I would be seen. I imagined the applause—or at least the acknowledgement—that someone might notice the effort behind every polite smile, every measured word, every small concession I made to appear correct.

But when the moment came, and the curtain finally rose and the light found me, I looked out and saw nothing—the seats were all empty. No clapping, no recognition, not even silence with weight in it. Just nothing.

And that is the part that haunts me. Not that no one showed up, but that I wasted years of my life afraid to break character, afraid to just… exist as myself. All that rehearsing, all that pretending, all for an audience that was never there.

Now it feels like the theatre is all I have left, and the only play running is my life. I don’t know how to end it, or even step off the stage, because I’ve forgotten who I was before the performance started—because maybe I never truly learned to exist without the invisible eyes.

The stage has become my home, and in the process, I lost my life.

Cover Art: The End of the Dance (1920) by Laura Knight

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But to someone else, this is the center of their world. 

They know the shortcuts, the cracked sidewalks, the way the light looks at 6 p.m. in late summer. They know which restaurant serves the best food, which field holds the echoes of their teenage laughter, which tree they used to climb before they were old enough to realize they’d miss it someday. Maybe their whole childhood is stitched into the corners of this town—the local bakery with the same smell every morning, the neighbours who drag out their plastic chairs in the evening and talk until the streetlights buzz on, the narrow streets they could walk with their eyes closed.

And here I am, a stranger just passing through. Just someone with a suitcase and no history here. I’ll leave with barely a memory, but this place holds entire lifetimes for someone else. Whole stories are written into the cracks of the pavement, into the familiar sound of the evening train, into the rhythm of the local radio station playing softly in a shop I’ll never return to. 

That thought gets me every time—

That I’m just passing through a place that means everything to someone else. 

That I’m just a client, without realising I’m being served by someone who holds an entire life I’ll never see.

I live in a place
where the voices of the locals
barely rise above a whisper.

Where the birds come when the sun is strong,
but vanish when the winds turn cold.
They say there are too many birds
and not enough nests.

But each December,
I walk past cribs hidden in palm trees,
empty and forgotten,
while the ones who built them
sleep in forests or on tile floors,
their wings clipped long ago.

They once soared.
They once ruled the air like they ruled the land.
Now they carry trays on broken wings,
serve seeds and sugar to the high-flying birds,
those first-class creatures
who never learn the name of the island beneath them.

That is why I hate the sun-followers,
not the birds who flew here for shelter, 
who arrived with feathers soaked from storms. 
But those who come only when the skies are clear, 
who drink from our rivers, 
pluck fruit from our trees, 
then vanish before the dust has time to settle.

Because tell me, 
how do a hundred thousand pigeons end up serving three million eagles?
How does a golden nest let its oldest hatchlings starve,
when it’s their wings that hold up the whole sky?

They call it paradise,
but never ask what was lost to make it shine.

It’s still a beautiful island—
depending on where you land.
It’s still a beautiful island—
if you’ve got nothing to lose.

But don’t be fooled.
This is not a story about birds.

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He didn’t even look at me. Maybe he didn’t even see me. God, I wish he hadn’t.

Because I’ve pictured that moment so many times I’ve lost count — imagined it unfolding in a dozen different ways. I thought that when it finally happened, something would stir in him. That he would stop in his tracks, hesitate, as if seeing me could unlock something long closed, something he’d buried deep. I pictured him freezing in the street, eyes wide with the sharp realisation that he missed me— missed my mouth, my touch, the messy strands of hair that never behaved. I imagined him chasing after a taxi, shouting my name into the rain, or showing up on my doorstep soaked and breathless. Or better yet— catching me in some posh restaurant, radiant and new, with someone else by my side. That was the version I liked best: the one where I had moved on, and he realised he hadn’t. The one where I was untouchable, no longer his.

When I left that day— walking out the front door without a backward glance— I told myself I wouldn’t wait. But I did. Quietly. Patiently. Waiting like the phone left face-up on the bedside table, like pausing outside the cafés we used to wander through, like pretending not to wait at all. I wanted him to miss me— not from guilt or loneliness, but because I wanted him to realise what I had meant to him. I wanted him to feel it in the hollow silence of mornings, in the cold, empty side of the bed. I wanted him to remember not just the rhythm of us, but the warmth.

But reality was far less romantic.

I wasn’t radiant. I was in my pyjamas, hair a mess, with a half-torn trash bag swinging from my hand. I wasn’t walking anywhere grand. I was just stepping out of my building, barely awake, heading for the bins at the end of the street. It was warm in that sticky, unforgiving way. I wasn’t thinking about him— not then— until I saw him.

He was sitting outside the pub just down the street. I hadn’t seen him there before, not once. And suddenly, there he was. A girl was laughing beside him— blonde and loud. His head tilted slightly, like he was listening, or maybe just watching the night stretch out in front of him. For a second, I wanted to vanish.

His hair was longer than I remembered— a little messier, a little softer, just how I once told him I liked it in a half-whisper as I traced his jaw in the dark. He used to run his hands through his hair when he was tired, and I’d flatten it out again just to feel close. I hadn’t thought about that in months. I hadn’t let myself.

Then he looked up.

Our eyes met. Not by accident, not in passing. He looked directly at me. Not with surprise, or recognition I could name— just stillness. Like the world dropped into a quieter gear for both of us. His face didn’t change— no smile, no frown, no flinch. But he looked. And he didn’t stop.

It was the kind of look that didn’t scream anything— not love, not regret— but lingered just long enough to make my chest tighten. Long enough to remind me that no matter how much I tried to bury it, some things don’t stay buried. Not really. And in that look, there was a trace of something I used to know so well: the way he could hold silence like it was language.

I stood there, trash bag in hand, feeling like a ghost in my own life.

He turned back to the girl beside him, still laughing at something someone had said. But I stayed frozen, just a moment longer—because a part of me needed to.

He looked at me longer than I wanted.

Long enough to remind me how fragile hope really is.

Long enough to unravel everything I’d tried so hard to mend.

He looked at me like I was a painting whose name he almost remembered—someone he once loved.

And somehow, that hurt more than if he hadn’t looked at all.

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Fifty years ago, if you went to the gym, there was one main speaker for everyone. You didn’t get to choose the playlist. People chatted between sets, bonded over the music. But then headphones appeared. Slowly, the speaker got quieter — until it disappeared.

Now, even in a room full of people, we’re all alone, together.

We don’t just listen to music anymore — we carefully choose songs that feel safe and familiar, already known to us. Even when we’re in the car with friends, we’re just waiting for our turn to take over the sound, never really hearing theirs at all.

Bit by bit, everything has been softened into a simplicity that dulls the hunger we once had.

In forty years, books have gotten easier.

In thirty years, homes have gotten simpler.

In twenty years, fashion has gotten lazier.

In fifteen years, communication has gotten emptier.

In ten years, TV shows have gotten shorter.

In eight years, personal taste has gone bland.

In four years, people have gotten dumber.

In two months, empathy has gone missing.

We made everything so easy that we forgot why we ever tried. Now we flinch at effort like it's pain. We treat discomfort like it means we’ve failed.  We want the result, not the process. We want to have read, not read. We want connection, but not conversation. We want change, but only if it’s instant.

Somewhere between convenience and comfort, we lost the thing that made us human.

The edge.

The hunger.

The fight.

We made the climb so easy, we forgot it was ever a mountain.

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Someone who choses me without hesitation.

Someone who makes ordinary days feel like warm light through a window.

Someone who makes my heart spill onto the page.

I’ve spend years convincing myself that loving makes you vulnerable, so I learned to want nothing. But the truth has a way of sneaking in. Even when I laugh off like a it’s a bad joke, a part of me wonders what It would be like to wake up into somebody’s arms.

It’s funny how loudly we push away things when we’re scared they won’t stay if we ask them to. The real heartbreak isn’t that love might not come — it’s admitting we were waiting for it all along.

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You could go to a doctor, demand tests, try to heal —
Or you could go home and try to stop the bleeding with an old shirt you once loved.

While pressing the worn fabric, you feel like you could get better, like maybe it was just a little scratch, left untreated.

But once that white shirt has turned red, the pain returns, stronger than ever.

Some people feel the bullet right away. They remember the exact day it hit them, the moment the shooter pulled the trigger. They feel the metal pierce their skin and slowly burrow toward their heart.

But others—others just wake up one day in a bed stained red.
They look down and finally see the wound, gaping and raw.
They run to the doctor, only to find out the bullet’s been inside them all along.
They just never noticed, until someone drove a nail into it.

Some can’t even go to the doctor. So they are forced learn to live with it.
But still—they notice the wound when they sit at a family dinner and the stiff shirt they wore rubs against it.
They wince when their mother says something cruel, something careless, like mentioning their laziness.

My mom doesn’t believe in medicine.

I showed her my wound.

She tried to convince me it was just a scratch.

That even if it was real, God would help us.

Well—that is, until someone’s on their deathbed.

But what she doesn’t know is:

I’m on it right now.

The wound has reached my head.

And I can’t see tomorrow.

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