Now Playing: The Best Day by Taylor Swift (I grew up in a pretty house and I had space to run and I had the best days with you)
Dearest Nine,
To be honest, dearest Nine, I don't know whether it's better to have teachers that hate you or teachers that love you. At least when teachers are mean to you the other kids more or less leave you alone. When teachers put you up on a pedestal, you become an easy target.
It's been three years since you were discovered as 'the kid who can write', and now you're finally getting something for it. Your teacher buys you a pen and a leather-bound journal and all the other kids are crazy jealous of this two dollar store presents.
There's a new boy at school and you're crazy in love, but this is the year that you realize that boys have terrible, terrible, terrible taste in girls - all the girls are saying it, not just you. And then you realize, given the six-second lifespan of grade four relationships, that boys choose the girls they think they want, or the girls that their friends will approve of, and you are neither. You get very hung up about this, dearest Nine, but I wish I could have told you that you don't need boys who worry about that. Now I've met boys who genuinely don't give a fuck what other people think or say about them and I can't help but admire them. It's the one thing I love most about the boys I love now.
That's the thing, dearest Nine. Every time you fall in love you think that this is it, you couldn't possibly love anyone anymore. You love them even if they hurt you, humiliate you, choose others over you. And then eventually you get over that, because there's someone else. There's always someone else, dearest Nine, always someone better than the last. I'm trying to convince myself of that now, that there will be someone else, because there always is. So don't let yourself fall too deep or get too hurt, dearest Nine, because no matter how perfect you think this boy or that boy is, there's always someone better. You run into that new kid when you're fourteen, dearest Nine, and he looked you up and down and you see a tiny pang of regret in his eyes that he didn't get to know you better. The thing about being single is that you can always, always begin again and move on to someone better. You've got nothing to lose, dearest Nine, and they...they've got you to lose. I wish you could have known how precious you are and even though so few people bother to get to know you, once they do they never let you go.
Dearest Nine, I know you're bored. Primary school is a long, hard road, and you can't see the end of the tunnel anymore. The year sevens look impossibly big and grown up and you can't see a point where you'll be like them. Hang in there, dearest Nine. These are the longest eight years of your life, but they're definitely not the best and they'll be over soon, I promise.
Love,
Nearly Seventeen.
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