You’re 17/18. Your home was taken from you. Your father who you idolized and never truly got to know was killed. Your brother insists your mother isn’t worth fighting for. You move in with two of your closest friends, who you only met within the last year. School is hell for you. Actual, unbearable hell. Everyone expects you to conform, even the people you love most, even if just to “stick it out.” You’re in love with a boy who values everything you can’t be. You just want to go home. You want a simple life. You want to be able to have that. You want to leave the stifling life now, and try to get back everything you lost in the one place you feel at home. And then you get it. And everyone leaves. Because the one future that didn’t sound like death to you (and the only future that wouldn’t literally slowly magically kill you) was not a future that anyone else planned for. Because everyone else was capable of moving on. And you only had an intangible goal of an imagined perfect past to move towards. And now you’re stuck in it.