The wind blows coldly from grey horizon to grey horizon, and the neverending threat of rain looms over the sky. The kind of weather, the kind of day that saps the spirits and clenches its tight and dreary grasp around our hearts. Summer is over, autumn has come with its windswept brown leaves and long dark nights. It feels as if all the hope has been washed out of the world, as if the only hope left is in those fragile hearts and minds that even now the season intensifies its grip on.

It feels like I’m slowly losing my perception of time, too. Days seem long and forbidding until they’re over and it strikes me how fleeting they really are. There are still eight of them left before I can leave this town, this job, and be in the place I want to be and with the people I want to be with more than anything else in the world. Eight days, and it feels like forever.

But, forever… What does that mean, now? I once dared hope that summer would last forever. I once dared believe that school might last forever. They didn’t, of course, they couldn’t. But to this day there is still the relic of hope in my heart, the hope that something might. University, maybe? Friendship? Life itself? I guess nothing in this world lasts forever, the most I can hope for is that they might last just long enough.

Nine months of life in Southampton await me, but that’s not forever. No more so than the next eight days will be. There’s a difference, though: I wish it was.

Life there is so full of everything - thoughts, emotions, things filling my heart and mind to the brim and overflowing. Here, though, there’s nothing like that. It’s dull, and mundane, and nothing feels worth doing. After I leave university, I might have to return to this way of life. But I don’t know how I’d cope with a forever like this, when just eight days is painful enough…