When the school gates were locked while I was in the seventh grade, I believed it was only temporary – a brief interlude of days or weeks. I constantly envisioned returning to my desk, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with my classmates. But days stretched into weeks, and weeks bled into years. Five crucial years of my youth – the very heart of my adolescence – have dissolved inside the quiet walls of our home.
In an uninterrupted world, this year would have marked my high school graduation. I should be navigating the intensity of final exams, preparing for university entrance tests, and planning a graduation ceremony with my friends. Instead, I remain suspended at the seventh-grade mark, even as I reach my eighteenth birthday.
The cruelest truth is the gulf between my reality and my hopes: in my mind, I am a graduate, yet my seventh-grade backpack still rests in the corner of my room. Over these five years, I have grown up, but my formal education remains frozen in time. This was meant to be the year I stepped into the future; instead, my path was severed before it truly began. Still, I quietly open my books in secret – refusing to accept that my dreams ended in the seventh grade.
April 28, 2026
By Nargis Nabizada