A Midsummer Night's Dream

I remember watching this film with my drama class in high school. It was the last day of Year Eight. I sat in the back row with my best friends, eating popcorn, laughing, making fun of Puck’s mistakes. We were two hours away from bursting through the gates, ready for summer.

Most of the class wasn’t paying attention, their voices filling the darkened room with quiet chatter. But I was mesmerised. The faeries—how they lived and bathed in the forest. The lovers. The chaos. The way everything unraveled, only to fall perfectly into place in the end.

I remember crying. Wiping my tears. Feeling silly.

Relieved the classroom was dim, that no one would notice. And yet, there was something about that afternoon that imprinted itself onto me.

2008 was a perfect year.

It’s funny what we remember. Nothing extraordinary happened. No defining, life-altering moment. But I loved my classes. The books we studied in English. Ice-skating for sports every Thursday. The way, once a week, in ceramics class, I could sit beside the boy I had the biggest crush on. He made the most intricate earthenware vases, and I would ask him questions I already knew the answers to—just to hear his voice.

I remember the exact day Coldplay’s Viva La Vida album was released. My brother and I cycled to school in the rain, singing the songs at the top of our lungs.

The morning of the sports carnival, I played the album on repeat. I ran until my lungs ached, ribbons curling through my fingers at the end of the day—not because I cared about winning, but because of how free it made me feel. Because of how we all sat together on the grass, laughing, cheering one another on.

There was something about that entire year that felt blissful.

The seasons. The predictability of routine. The joy in all the small simplicities in between.

I thought I was crying that day because of the story. But I think I was crying because of nostalgia. Because I already knew—even then—that things would never be as they were in that moment.

I have had a knack for this my whole life.

Anticipatory grief.

Of moments. Of people. Of myself.

Feeling the weight of time passing before it even does, as though my future self is constantly nudging my past, whispering—Oh, God, hold onto this. Hold onto it. It’s so good, and it will never be quite like this again.

Some chapters in life, you miss before they even end. Some, you wake from, wondering if they ever really happened at all. Like Bottom in the play—was it all just a dream?

Some things cannot be described in words. Only felt.

Today, it rained all day.

And for the first time since that afternoon in 2008, I watched the movie again.

And I cried. I sobbed.

Grateful for my thirteen-year-old self, who felt just as deeply as I do now.

I cried for the lovers. I laughed at Puck’s mistakes. And I cried for the inevitability that—through whatever chaos or uncertainty—things do, and will always, find their way.

We adjust. We recreate. We grow into the next chapter, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Perhaps not in the ways we imagined.

But always in the ways we were meant to.