I always think about the future. I think about where I'm going after university, what my relationship with my future wife will look like, how I want to raise my future kids. But tonight I doubt that I want all of it; the "big picture" doesn't just make sense anymore. I should just go to sleep because I'm very tired, but I'm also extremely restless with the world. I'm 16 and all I do is wait for the future to happen.

In the last 6 months I've come to learn a lot more about the world and myself - especially in terms of relationships and love. I've realised that it's just not going to go the way you want. I had a girlfriend who I thought was perfect for me, but she had greater priorities in her life than a relationship. Nothing I could've done about that. Doesn't matter how much we got along or how safe we felt in each other's company. Just because it could work doesn't mean there's always a way it will.

That's what I learned today, after finding another girl after five months of feeling lonely, sad, and hopeless. She seemed so much better for me than the last girl, she made me realise how unspecial the last relationship was and made me excited about the possibility of this one. She seemed to like me as much as I liked her. She was smart, funny, beautiful, kind - everything you could wish for. Over the three weeks I spent getting to know her and starting to like her I became confident that this would flourish into a beautiful relationship. But she had stuff in her life - stuff I'll never know - that meant she couldn't handle a relationship at the time. In my head I figured I just need to approach it in the right way - take things slow, keep pushing - but she didn't and never would have changed her mind. Because it's not in my control. We would've been great for each other but who cares. Great chemistry isn't a promise from the universe that it's going to work out.

So now I've had this realisation - along with countless other realisations that I can't quite put into words - that are all out in the open in my mind, and I have no clue how to process them. My conception of the future is foggy now, for the first time in my life, and I'm not really certain about anything. It's scary.

I think that this is a stage of maturity that everyone goes through at some point, but I feel very isolated in my head. It feels like I've been taken out of a warm home and suddenly dropped into the front lines of a war. Suddenly my whole life ahead of me is becoming apparent - not just a fantasy - but something that is actually happening. Yet it's unclear what my future actually is now.