I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to pull out my yearbooks. I don't know what exactly I was going to do, looking at them. Reflect, I guess. Looking at the photos of my grade, it just dawned on me how fast everyone has grown, and thinking about that really made me sad. How different everyone was in Year seven, the groups they were in, who their friends were. We were such different people. Maybe we grew up too fast. Maybe we grew up so fast we didn’t even know it. And when people grow, they change, and God knows how inevitable that is, because everyone changes at some point in their life. They grow because they learn and experience things, and they change because they let these things in their life at home or at school affect them. Sometimes the things that affect people are so little they don’t even notice it, but eventually it all starts building up and it changes them.

Sometimes, change is good. People change for the better, there are new opportunities, a fresh start. But sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. When I was young I thought I could do anything, be anyone I wanted. I knew who I was and what I wanted. But over the years I've become disenchanted; I didn't really see the change until one day I woke up and thought, what the hell happened to me? I didn't turn out to be the person I always thought I would be. I was afraid, shy, bitter. I needed change. So I altered aspects of my life, and to this day there are things I don't agree on with my friends.

God, we were so different then. Back then we all wanted the same things. But we grew up, and suddenly we become different people and we want different things. We always said we'd stick together. But the truth is, we each want to go down such different paths. And as much as we want it to be true, things happen and people change. I remember when I first started high school, a group of us who knew each from primary stuck together. But then one of my closest friends left, and when I asked her why she didn't hang out with us anymore she said we were boring, and that we don't do anything. She went on to become one of the most popular girls in school. When I tell people we were once friends, they're surprised because we are so different. Sometimes I pass her down the hallway but we barely look at each other or even say hi. She turned into a stranger. I remember we used to talk about what we would do in high school, who we would be. Funny that, because neither of us ever turned out to be the people we said we would be.

In the beginning, everyone was everyone else's best friend. But over the years we segregated into groups; and we kept separating until we had all put walls up around ourselves. We have had such different experiences over the past few years that it feels like I've been living in a different world to everyone else. Different things happened to us. Boys came along, and people changed. Some of my friends have 'done it' with guys and they came out of the experience as different people. They thought they had experienced so much more of life than the rest of us; people closed into themselves. More bricks, higher walls. But this year is our last year of high school and we said we'd try to make the most of it. Some walls have come down, but some still remain because some changes just cannot be undone.

I still feel like things have passed me by. I wish I could get the last four years of my life back so I can live it all again, properly. Everything just happened so fast. I don’t even know what I did in those three years. It’s like I’m standing here and all the time in the world is whizzing right past me and I’m trying to catch or hold on to something to slow it down but I can’t. And before you know it it feels like your body’s in the present but your mind’s still trapped in the past. People say that you can't be content with the present until you've dealt with the past. There are moments that I still think about, and that sometimes haunt me, in the past in which everything hinged; a single breath in any direction could have changed everything that followed. The course of our lives were dependant upon these moments in which everything changed. We were so young then, I doubt any of us saw it all coming. But now I realise, and I understand; but until I find a way to face these moments, and consequently accept change, I will never be able to move on. 

"I sit in silence and hear the echoes of who we used to be." - Peyton Sawyer