Life at Sixteen

The art of timeless reminiscing is one that we've all perfected over time. We each have a time or place we'd return to in a heartbeat given the chance.

I miss life at sixteen. Being young, naive and innocent holds a certain appeal five years later. Because when you're sixteen, life's just beginning. You have a ten-year plan in which you include everything from brilliant GCSE results to marriage and kids so that by the time you're twenty seven, your life has fallen into place. You don't even think to consider adding in a footnote in which you'll be scribbling the heartbreaks and setbacks and re-directions that are likely to come your way.

We're so busy planning the future that we forget to live in the present. Because the truth is, you will miss studying for subjects that aren't going to contribute to that dream career of yours. You will miss petty assignments like that scene you had to act out from A View From The Bridge, and that chip shop you had to bring to life in your descriptive writing piece. You will miss the friendships that you thought would last forever but never for one second imagined you'd have to work at. Because my God will it take work. Every single day. And you'll wish you were still together in high school seamlessly breezing through it creating those memories that are still the highlights of your life, but you're not, and you'd kill to re-live them, but you can't, and that's kind of okay because you still have them, and all you can really do is treasure that rare friendship you're lucky to still have. You will miss having far-fetched dreams and looking forward to what the future holds. You will miss believing in love and easy success and the excitement of the real world.

Because one day, before you know it, you're 21 and your grip on teenage life is long lost. You'll find yourself clawing away at time you think you have, but don't. You'll realise you still have so much to achieve and so much you still want to see, and you'll wish that you could just stop the clock before time catches up with you and robs of you of what you once wanted but never quite got.

And that's what I miss about being sixteen; it's the time you're blissfully unaware that the world is a cruel and unforgiving place. It's the time you have your whole life ahead of you; every dream is pinned in place and every aspiration is still to play for. You have nothing to lose. But the part I miss the most?

It was the time when I first caught a glimpse of adult life and it seemed so...tempting.