Yesterday, a child came out to wander.

It was the end of an era.

The day dawned gloomy and grey. It started raining before the sun even rose and it carried on throughout the day, a persistent drizzle occasionally peaking in bursts that drenched you in six seconds. There was one moment in the day when I saw the sun: it reflected off the puddles on the road and left me wincing, half-blind.

It was the last ever day of school, and I was stood on a wall. There was a water gun in my hand and my friends on either side of me, and a lipstick-and-eyeshadow lighting bolt daubed on my face, covering my left eye and reaching down to my jaw. I was dressed as David Bowie, my red hair slicked back, my legs encased in a pair of non-stretch silver leggings.

It was the last ever day of school, universally known as Muck-Up Day, and the theme was "Space". The evening before, the whole of Year 13 had stayed an extra three hours after school. We had blown up a thousand balloons in pink, silver and black. We had hung paper stars from the ceiling and taped square metres of bubble wrap to the floor. We had filled a bathroom with cups half-full of water and draped the lower corridor in black fabric and photoshopped teachers' faces into Top Trumps cards, which were all over the walls. Classrooms were filled with balloons, or aliens, or turned into impossible stacks of tables and wrapped in toilet paper. Outside, the sign hanging from the library window proclaimed "WELCOME TO URANUS".

We got to school early that morning, and arranged the finishing touches. Once the lower years started to arrive, we soaked them with water pistols and laughed. Lydia painted herself green and we affectionately mocked her for it, as well as for her decision to wear shorts in the freezing cold. We were all dressed as spacemen or aliens, singing along to McFly's Star Girl, and it was an utter denouement when we realised that the fun and larks were over and we would have to clear up.

I was assigned a classroom with the desks arranged in a pyramid. While attempting to lift one of the desks off the third tier, I fell off a desk and spilt the cup of tea I'd left on the teacher's table. It covered a German dictionary, and - laughing hysterically - I reflected how my final contribution to school life was ruining someone else's property.

Emily drove me home once we'd tidied up, and I was so tired I fell asleep with the Bowiebolt still on my face.

That evening was Leavers' Ball. It seemed strange, how close together the events were - how we had to wake up at 6am for our last, curtailed day of school, and then stay awake until 11.30pm for the black-tie celebration that our formal education was over. We met at Sarah's house and drank champagne and took photos. I was in a dinner jacket and my friends were in long floating gowns. Everyone looked so beautiful that I felt a lump in my chest. I still have it now, thinking back: there was so much beauty in one room that it ought to have come with a warning.

I lost count of many things that evening.

I lost count of how many photos were taken. How many times my friends cried. How many hugs we doled out. How many times someone complained about their shoes hurting their feet. How many compliments we gave out, to everyone we saw. They flowed fluidly and easily, like the free wine - and I meant every one.

I definitely lost count of how many glasses of wine I drank. How many times we announced to people we barely knew - despite having been at the same school as them for years - that we would miss them. How many times I looked at all the happy couples, and sighed inwardly, and mourned my lack of a date.

How many times we laughed.

"This is it," Gill said. "We're grown-ups now. This is the end."
"I've been a grown-up for a while," I said. "Legally, at least."
"We'll be 20 next year!" Emily said, looking at me, and we exchanged shocked grimaces.
"It's gone so fast," Gill added.
"It's all over," Lydia said.

The moment I remember the most from the evening was not accidentally outing myself to the lighting technician, or dancing the Macarena in killer heels, or telling Gill to start working on having "a reasonable number of babies". It was before dinner (and before I drained two bottles of rose, which might explain my clarity of memory) when the Chaplain said grace. Or rather, sang it. She sang The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell.

I watched a tear track down Sarah's face, taking off her foundation in a neat line. I heard Gill next to me sniffling, so I grabbed her hand, and Lydia's on my other side. Gill took Georgina's hand, and Georgina took Emily's, and in a moment we were all sat there, connected.

I don't believe in God any more than I believe in the Tooth Fairy, but I do believe there are things we can't properly understand. Things we can only feel. In the end, love is what keeps us all here, and keeps us going, and love is what we have when we're hand in hand realising that this is a paradox. This is the end. This is a new beginning. It's bittersweet and glorious and full of ghosts of the past and spectres of the future, and this is what we have when everything else is stripped from us.

We have each other. We have love.

What we talk about when we talk about stress.

Recently I've been sleeping a lot more, and dreaming a lot less.

This isn't how you're supposed to respond to stress. You're supposed to lie awake long into the small hours of the night and twitch with anxiety. Stress is supposed to give you nightmares or patterns of interrupted sleep. You're supposed to eat less and less and slowly wither away, consumed by a vague but lingering sense of panic, in the back of your mind or the pit of your stomach or some other fringe of your body.

I haven't been getting that.

My A-level exams are looming. For my international readers (hi, I kind of can't believe you exist), A-levels are the standardised tests you do in England at the end of your last year of school. Their results arbitrarily determine your future, if you get into the university you want to or are sent to your insurance choice or have to go through the confusing process known as clearing - which seems like a January sales-type deal, where you apply to empty places that other universities have due to their applicants messing up - or if you need to retake your exams. Of course, if your future doesn't involve university, then they are a lot less relevant.

But the fact of the matter is that I am relying on my grades to get to university. My offer from the University of York is fairly low and pretty easily achievable for me; I can drop a grade from my predicted mark in each subject and still exceed it. Perhaps this is why I'm not stressing the way my friends are.

Of course, with everything I do, I feel like there is a niggling fear that I will fuck up, and I will fail. Every time I write an essay, I turn it in thinking about how I could have improved it, and how it's my own laziness which is preventing me from doing so. When you don't have to work hard, sometimes you stop caring. I'm worried that this will happen to me, that I will become complacent from treading water and suddenly sink. I am cool and nonchalant, but inside my head I am afraid of doing it wrong.

This is what stress is to me. I don't down bottles of wine or party into oblivion to forget, but I don't obsessively revise either. Stress over my impending trip to Japan is probably compounding issues - it's less than two months till we leave and we haven't finished booking accommodation! That is stressing me out! What if we get to Kyoto and have to illegally camp in a park?! By comparison, I'm finding it a little difficult to care about the GOP position on immigration or William James' essays on religious experience or the dramatic presentation of power in King Lear.

Sure, my future might hinge on how well I can bullshit about Webster's poetry, but what if I don't book a hostel in Hiroshima in time and have to pay an extra five pounds a night?!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have no sense of proportion. I am a little bit stressed over a lot of things, so I focus on the most innocuous because - well. That's just it. I don't know why. Maybe because it's the least scary.

It'll all be over soon, and until them I guess I will continue to sleep less and eat about the same amount, and hope it all works itself out in the end.