nostalgia.

i wish i could go back to year eleven. around about may or april or something.

every lunch i used to go to my best friends house and we'd melt chocolate and put rice crispies in it, or we'd go back to mine and eat jam on toast. we never had to hang around with the people we didn't want to anymore because we were year eleven and that meant you could leave the school at lunch times.

i used to have five lessons free a week to go home and do whatever i wanted in them. and because my english teacher left, and the subsitute was shit, my parents wouldn't care if i told them i wasn't going into english and sat at home and taught myself instead.

and i remember walking back to school and seeing my friends that did art (which was the first exam) and they were walking away saying "we're going to go sit on a field, art's finished now so we don't have to go back for it."

and i remember sitting on the field with some friends before our science exam, we all sat there chatting and not really apprehensive at all.

and we only really had to go in for exams and my friends would say "we're not going into maths today, want to go to the field?" and we would. and we all revised at home and we all passed.

and nothing seemed to matter much anymore, because we were all free. we all knew we had a month or so and then it'd be over. compulsory schooling would be over for all of us, and we'd all made it.

and so we could turn up late and nobody would really care, or we'd not turn up at all and nobody would care, or we'd refuse to do things and nobody could do anything about it. and we all thought "yeah this is our life now". and we all felt like we'd finally grown up.

and then we had our summer to do whatever we wanted in. and i didn't go to prom because i didn't want to. and we met up in the summer and we had parties and we got drunk. and we all felt happy and like we were finally doing things we wanted to do.

and we got our results and we were happy with what we got.

but then it all just sort of... deflated. for me, at least. i just started questioning what was worth it; after i'd just left that schooling environment, why would i want to go straight back into it to break my back for two years trying to achieve "a-levels"? it seemed stupid. it seemed going against the idea of our newfound freedom.

and my friends agreed with me (sortof). but nobody else did anything. and i went to college like everyone else thinking "am i free? or am i just in another box?"

and i used to stare out the windows in psychology and law and look at all the little people doing their jobs and i just thought "why?" what was the point? did it make them happy? did they feel free? why did everyone put themselves in these little boxes?

and so i purposely flunked my exams so i could be free again. they basically said i had to leave law, and if i had to leave law, i was no longer a full-time student, and i was sortof probationary for psychology, and i was doing well at english but i didn't want to be in that stupid room with that stupid teacher spouting thoughts she'd picked up from text-books. she never had a singular thought of her own, and that drove me crazy. what drove me even more crazy, was the fact that everyone in the class saw her as a saint, a genius, when i thought she was just a phony. i literally loathed her and spent all my time in her class wishing for the courage to stand up and walk out.

and then i sat at home for nine months "free" and horrifically unhappy/uncreative. blah blah blah.

i just wish i could go back to that time when things seemed hopeful, i guess. now things seem sortof... "lesser of two evils". that's my feeble attempt at articulation. i hope for your sake you stopped reading half-way through. or before.