on Change

All Year Round: Change

It’s the year of the Lord: 2025. I’m going to be a high school senior soon, but before that, it is as if my entire world is going to crash down to my feet and split into two.Change is unmistakably, weird. You could say it’s real, could say it’s necessary, could say it’s a fundamental principle of life: it wouldn’t change how genuinely weird change is.Everything that you have ever held close to your heart will melt away, that is the nature of life - and we cannot help it. We are indisposed to the chores that we carry out everyday, to spend more than fifteen seconds thinking about how much has changed. I’m a year away from eighteen, I feel like I’m ten years old and in my bed in my room with the lights off and One Direction is blasting from the speaker.I am the age that my favourite characters are, I am the age I dreamed of being at eight and then at ten and then at thirteen. I hope I am living up to it.A year ago today, I was in the middle of writing my board exams, and bent out of sorts about them. A year from now, I will be writing my boards again, but I will already have written what is possibly one of the most important exams of my life. I understand the magnitude of it. I can hold it in my hand, it’s so close, I can taste it.Change is a current, it is the ocean. It meanders and depends, and it changes, and it leans and bends and it’s like all hell breaks loose if you spend too long thinking about it - so you don’t. A year seems like an immensely short time when I talk about these exams - but even a little get together where my best friend isn’t there beside me (because let’s be real, she should be) lasts eons and ends almost never.Change takes, and takes, and never asks. When the year started, it took away my words and rendered me to two years of silence. Now that I’ve gotten used to the quiet, it hands me my pen and orders me to write. And far be it for me to protest - a simple plebeian in the face of the ocean - give me a break. Its waves crash upon me, and hard as I try, I cannot outrun the blue. So as things go, it wraps me in more, and more, and more water - until I’m almost drowning in it.Almost - they say you only drown when you lose hope.What started with figurative silence may easily become literal, and I shall be all the better for it - I have decided. My best friend is moving seven thousand miles away from me. The boy I’ve liked for so long doesn’t like me back. I’ve grown a year, my hair’s longer, old friends aren’t friends anymore. The exam I’ve been trying so hard to not think about comes back again, knocking on my door, hat in hand; mine, of course, reminding me of the mundaneness that awaits through it all.I find that I’ve forgotten the dance to No Control, forgotten the cheer for Girl Almighty, forgotten the claps in Olivia. One day, I’ll grow out of all my favourite songs. I won’t talk to the people I consider my whole world to revolve around anymore. It’s not preventable.There are three things I learnt this year.Number 1: Do it, or don’t. The time will pass anyway.All that you do, is for you. It has to be. You cannot live your life unashamedly if you live for somebody else.“But it’s so hard.”; did you expect it to be easy? I’ve learnt this year that you really only have two choices in a situation, you either do it, or you don’t. The time passes anyway. It does not wait for you to tie your shoelaces or to thank God. It passes. You cannot get it back.It’s funny how, even though you spend the year looking at clocks, you don’t really understand how much of it has passed until you look back, and time doesn’t wait for you to do that, either. It is alright to be petrified at the prospect of a decision, it is okay to let your figs plop down to your feet. The tree lives - the figs regrow and then, you’ll have your moment.One year, or one moment - it’s not the end all-be all. It never was, never has been. Time passes anyway - it does not care for your state of being. The good and the bad pass together, hand in hand, embracing each other. You can’t lose yourself in fear of being wrong, or worse, late.Number 2: You can’t outrun change.Change is not escapable, it never was. The waves will always crash back to the shore, and just when the water feels warm, it will pull back. You cannot help it. Really, all you can do is try to save yourself through it.Sit, watch, feel, taste the moment, take it in your hands and let it run through your hair. You must know, though, the sand sinks. The waves will always come, the tide will still pull back, the sand will always sink. If you stand still too long, it’ll swallow you up whole.Change is inevitable. What’s happening is what was going to happen if you’d taken two extra sugars three years ago, and it was going to happen even if you’d stayed in on Saturday night. All you have to do is make sure you don’t drown, or burn in the sun.You have to let the water hold you.Number 3: Let go of the things you hold close.If you’d asked me how I was feeling a few months ago, I would’ve said that life felt stagnant - had been feeling stagnant the entire year. I couldn’t get started on this very essay, or do anything very well - much less chemistry (in more ways than one). If you ask me now; everything’s moving too fast. Somehow, I’m a week away from senior year. I have two weeks left with my best friend. I have nine months until I sit for my fuckass entrance exams.This year feels different, fundamentally. It’s making a slight shiver run down my spine and I’m not sure if that’s a good sign. All I know is, the last time this happened, I had one of the best years ever.All the things you hold close will slip away, whether you want them to or not. Time passes, telephone cords are cut, phone numbers change, so do people’s addresses and fundamentally - people.You are changing. I am changing. We’re all changing, constantly. It’s frustrating and endlessly annoying, but it’s true. Things that are meant to be in your life, bend and meander in ways that fit with you. If something’s slipping away, even after countless pieces of gum have been wasted on sticking the two of you together; let it go. It’s time.Nostalgia isn’t a historian, nostalgia is a poet.You are the memory. Not the moment.

notes:
the do it or dont line - pinterest
the nostalgia line - instagram
credits to actual writers for these two :3