“This is it, son,” my father told me, “these are the moments you’ll look back on. Enjoy them while you still can and try not to forget.”

I was 16 then. He was driving me home and I was telling him about my plans for the summer. Back then, I had no way of knowing how unaware I was of the world around me; I was just happy to live in the moment. My father, having gone through life, knew ahead of time which way I was headed. He said to me, multiple times “I’ve been in your shoes before, you’re yet to grow into mine,” yet I never took his word for it.

So, whilst I travelled the country up and down that summer with my friends, going to festivals and to the beach, having a good enough time to the point we promised ourselves to do the same the following years, my father stood and watched with an all-knowing eye as I approached an inevitable ‘last’.

That ‘last’ came together with the end of summer. By the time I realised what was happening, I had already cracked my last sunflower seed and shared a last gossip, I embraced them all and shook their hands and kissed their cheeks for one last time, I made them break out in one last laugh, joined in on one last argument, I was someone’s shoulder to cry on for one last time and one last shared memory was created. From then on, there was nothing else that could’ve been done. We were all different people and our friendship escaped our grasps without us realising it.

Thinking back to my father’s words, a fear of forgetting about these parts of my life crept up on me. That fear is what made me want to write. With the start of autumn, I put down on paper everything that I could remember. It didn’t matter to me at the time how. I wrote pages upon pages of both poetry and prose, detailing every part of my life. Every time my father’s words come to mind now, I have a look through those pages and find comfort in the fact that they will always be there for me, never to be forgotten.