I’m fine, by the way. Just so you know. Absolutely, one-hundred-percent, rainbows-and-unicorns fine.
I mean, yes, there was that teensy, tiny, wibbly little bit of time when I wasn’t ok, but that’s over now. Now, I’m hunky dory. I’m A-OK. I skip through the proverbial fields of life with an allegorical woven hand basket full of metaphorical daisies. Wearing figurative pigtails.
And really, that blip of not-OK-ness was only to be expected. That’s what happens when everything you worked yourself to the bone for, lost countless nights of sleep over, gave up half your social life for and which you concentrated on nothing else but, falls to pieces in front of your eyes and you realise that your entire life plan has come crashing down around your ears. It’s possible that complex sentences and clichés like that were what lost me those precious three marks that took me from an A to a B and lost me my place at university.
Three marks.
Three teensy, tiny, wibbly little marks. Three lines on a page. Three ticks for neat handwriting, good spelling, the ability to write my own name, the fact that I even turned up to the godamn exam in the first place…
Not that I’m upset about it. Because I’m not. I’ve moved on. I can see only the positives of not going to university this year, the year that the majority of my friends and classmates will go, while I stay at home and do retakes and try to find another thankless part-time job and try not to let the general mind-numbing dullness of our hometown drive me to insanity.

Ok, that’s all a bit emo I’ll admit. But it’s not like I’m writing a song about it and then carving the lyrics into my wrist with a compass or anything. I’m just ever so slightly p***ed off about the whole ordeal that my life has now become. See, the thing is that I’m a bit of a daydreamer, and in my hazy exams-are-over-never-have-to-go-back-again-(ha!-how-little-I-knew) mind I imagined this great, possibly achievable summer for myself in which:
a) I got a cool job at the local theme park and made a ton of great new friends
b) I went on a sun-soaked holiday with my best friends from school and sipped cocktails on the beach whilst getting glistening tans and being fawned over by hot foreign guys
c) the boy I liked from college fiiiiiiinally saw what he was missing (I.e. me) at some party or another and we’d spend an idyllic month or two together before:
d) the Piece De Resistance - I got my AAB or ABB results and went to university, where I would start a new life and live Happily Ever After.
Instead, here is what actually happened:
a) I got a job at the local theme park and made a ton of great new friends… and spent five days a week explaining that no, you can’t buy coffee from a sweet shop yes, the prices are high but what can I do about it and painting approximately four hundred fidgety little spidermen and butterflies in the face painting hut.
b) My best friends from school and I never got round to booking a holiday in time for me to get the time off work, but did spend a large amount of time supping cocktails in various local Weatherspoons and complaining over the lack of hot local guys (or, in fact, vaguely decent local guys. Or just local guys who didn’t think that the most smooth, romantic wooing technique was to grab your a**e on the dance floor of a club, followed up by an oh-so-swoon-worthy wink-and-thumbs-to-self-gesture)
c) the boy I liked from college remained completely oblivious, and I ended up dripping wet locked outside my own house at two in the morning ringing my little sister to let me in (long, long story), before:
d) the Piece De Resistance - I got BBB in my exams and due to the vast amount of other applicants was told by my insurance choice that in any other year I would have been close enough to an A to get a place anyway but I was a Victim Of Circumstance and it had to be a no. Really sorry. But good luck in all your future endeavours.

I went through all the rigmarole of clearing, of course, just to decide that there was no point in going to university if I didn’t absolutely love it (or at least feel even vaguely fond of it) and that I Could Do Better. And now… well, I’ve already explained that. Job hunting. Retaking. Watching friends leave. Hoping that three months of travelling once I’ve dragged myself through another round of essays on stuff I learnt last year, mixed with a bit of carefully chosen volunteer work and some on-my-knees begged for work experience will be enough to guarantee me a place at uni next year. Hoping even more that I will find some way of making the next five months (five months until January, five months until I can get on a plane and get away from here…) remotely bearable.

And that is where you, and the list, come in.