Last First - By Izianne Tish Berjamin

Written By: Izianne Tish Berjamin

Category: Essay

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the reflective essay "Last First," Izianne Tish Berjamin presents a poignant exploration of the bittersweet transition from the familiar routines of high school to the unknown future. As a participant in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, Izianne offers readers an introspective glimpse into the emotions surrounding the beginning of a senior year, capturing the unique blend of excitement and melancholy that accompanies such a pivotal moment in life.

About the Work

"Last First" delves into the theme of transition, weaving a narrative rich with nostalgia and introspection. The essay beautifully captures the quiet realizations and subtle emotions experienced during significant life changes. Through vivid imagery and thoughtful reflection, Izianne explores the concept of time, memory, and personal growth, inviting readers to ponder their own journeys and the lasting impact of seemingly ordinary moments.

Last First

Original Submission by Izianne Tish Berjamin

Last First

I woke up before I had properly fallen asleep. That's the only way I can describe it. At some point the dark in my room turned grey, and I was already lying there with my eyes open, trying to decide whether the thing sitting on my chest was excitement or worry. I couldn't tell. I think it was both, which is a very inconvenient thing for a feeling to be at five in the morning.

It was the first day of Grade 12. My last first day.

I had tried to be smart about this year. Over the summer, while other people slept until noon, I sat at my desk and wrote my college applications. Personal statements. Activity lists. Small boxes asking me to explain who I am in 150 characters. I did it early on purpose. I didn't want my future competing with my senior year. I wanted senior year to have all of me.

What I didn't notice, until that morning, was what I had actually been doing all summer. I had been filling out documents for a life that doesn't exist yet. Describing a person who would be living somewhere else. Every essay was, in a way, a forwarding address. And I had been so busy preparing to arrive that I never once noticed I was also preparing to leave.

* * *

I take a different bus this year.

On my old bus, I had a seatmate. Most mornings we'd fall asleep next to each other, sometimes ending up on each other's shoulders without either of us deciding to. We never mentioned it. That was the whole point. It was the kind of comfort you only get from not having to talk.

Now I sit in the back middle row, where the windows are mostly the backs of other seats. If I lean, I can catch a strip of road, a slice of sky, a sign going by too fast to read.

The new bus is fine. Better, honestly, for reasons that made sense when I switched. It goes to the same school. It gets me there on time.

But I've started to think a route isn't only a way of getting somewhere. It's also the thing you look at while you're getting there. You can change it for good reasons and still arrive with nothing from the trip: no shoulder, no window, just the destination, which was never really the part you were living in.

* * *

When I got to school, someone called me for duty before I'd even put my bag down. I put on my Secretariat sash.

I should confess that I barely did anything as Secretariat last year. I designed banners. I took notes when someone remembered to ask. I did the digital things nobody sees. But the sash doesn't know any of that, and on the first day, the sash is the point. So I stood near the entrance and welcomed people. Good morning. Welcome back. Welcome to TPS.

I swear they did not feel welcomed.

I wasn't being cold. I was smiling. I was trying. But I was somewhere else entirely, and I think people can tell when you're saying "welcome" from very far away. It's a strange job to be handed on the day you feel least at home: standing at the door of a place, telling other people they belong in it, while privately wondering whether you still do.

I was the welcome committee for a year I was already grieving.

* * *

Then I walked into my classroom.

It was the same classroom as last year. The same room. Same walls, same windows, same particular hum of the aircon, same desks in roughly the same rows. They had put us back into the exact space we had just left, except it wasn't us anymore. A different section. Different faces in the seats.

I remember thinking, a little dramatically, that it was dreadful. It felt like the school had taken nostalgia and slapped it directly in my face.

What made it so disorienting was that nothing had changed enough to deserve the feeling. If they'd repainted, or moved the board, or sent us to a new room on another floor, I would have had something to blame. Instead the room was perfectly, stubbornly the same. The chair by the window was still the chair by the window. It just didn't know that the person who used to sit there, who leaned back and complained about quizzes and laughed at things that weren't that funny, was gone.

The room didn't know. That was the whole problem. Rooms don't remember. Chairs don't miss anyone. The walls held this year exactly as calmly as they had held the last one.

But I knew. And standing there, I understood that a place can stay exactly the same and still become a completely different place, because the difference was never stored in the room. It was stored in me. The room was just where I kept finding it.

* * *

We made a frame for the last first day. Of course we did. Everyone squeezed in and held it up, someone counted down, and we smiled.

I've looked at the photo since. It's a good photo. It has my face, the frame, the classroom, my classmates, the light from the windows.

It doesn't have the thing I was actually feeling, which was the quiet knowledge that I would never do this again. You can't see that. It isn't in the pixels. Anyone looking at it later would see a group of students on a first day, which is what we were, and also not what we were at all.

I used to think we take photos to keep moments. Now I think we take them because we already know we can't. A photograph isn't the moment saved. It's more like a receipt. Proof that it happened, that we were there, that it was real, even after it stops being something we can walk back into.

* * *

I spent a lot of that day just wandering.

Nothing looked different. That's what kept getting me. The hallway where we used to wait before assembly. The stairs where someone always stopped to tie their shoe at the worst possible moment. The corner where we stood around planning things we never ended up doing. All of it was exactly where I left it.

And everywhere I walked, I kept seeing us. Not in a haunted way. Just memory doing what memory does, laying last year over this one like tracing paper. The people who used to stand there. The jokes. And mostly, the girl who walked those hallways without any idea that one day she'd walk them again just to remember her.

That was when I started to suspect I didn't miss the hallways at all.

I don't think nostalgia is homesickness for a place. I think it's homesickness for the person you were when the place was yours. I wasn't missing the classroom. I was missing the girl who sat in it last year and assumed it would always be there. I wasn't missing the old bus. I was missing being someone who could fall asleep on the way to school, because she believed there would be a thousand more mornings exactly like that one.

* * *

The strangest absence was the seniors.

Every first day I can remember, the seniors were there. The loud ones, the tall ones, the ones who walked the hallways like the building had been built around them. Last year I watched them the way you watch a train pull out of a station you're not leaving from. I thought: they're leaving. That's what seniors do. They're the ones going away.

This year I kept half-expecting to see them. My eyes went to the places they used to stand.

They weren't there, because they were us.

I don't know how to explain how much that scared me. I had spent years watching that version of the future from a safe distance, and somewhere along the way the distance closed without telling me. There was no day I stopped being the one who watched and started being the one who was watched. I just looked up, and the people I was waiting for weren't coming, because I had already become them.

* * *

I keep thinking about why childhood felt so long. Summers that went on forever. A school year that felt like an entire life.

I read once that it isn't because time actually moved slower. It's because everything was new. When you're young you notice everything, so your memory keeps everything, and when you look back there's so much there that it feels enormous. Then life starts repeating. The same bus, the same hallway, the same Tuesday. Your brain stops writing it all down. It files ten mornings as one morning. Time doesn't speed up. We just stop paying attention to it.

Which means the most ordinary parts of high school were disappearing while I was living them. The bus rides. Sitting with friends at lunch. Complaining about deadlines. Watching the clock before dismissal like it owed me money. Seeing the same people every single day. I didn't know any of it was turning into memory. It never announced itself. It was just Tuesday.

And I think that's the real problem with lasts. You almost never know you're in one. The last time my seatmate fell asleep on my shoulder, neither of us knew it was the last time. It felt exactly like every other time. "Last" isn't something you can see while it's happening. It only becomes visible later, from the future, looking back.

Except this year. This year, I know.

* * *

I keep trying to find the moment the first version of me ended. The girl who walked into this school for the first time, nervous, looking for her room, not knowing anyone's name. The girl on her first bus ride, at her first school event, the first time someone handed her a responsibility and she was terrified she'd mess it up. The girl who thought she had so much time left.

When did she become me?

I can't find it. There's no date. No moment where one of us stopped and the other started. She just kept being replaced by someone slightly different every ordinary morning, so slowly that neither of us noticed, until one day the replacement was standing at the school entrance in a sash, wondering where everyone had gone.

Maybe that's what growing up actually is. Not discovering that everything changes; I think I already knew that. It's discovering that almost nothing has to change for everything to be different. The room can stay. The bus can stay. The hallway can stay. And you can still become a stranger in all of them, because the one thing that moved was you.

* * *

I'm not sad about my future. I want to be clear about that, mostly to myself. I wrote those applications because I want to go. There's a life ahead of me that I'm genuinely excited about. Leaving is the point. It's supposed to happen.

But knowing something in your head doesn't stop it from hurting somewhere else. I can be ready for what comes next and still not be ready to lose this. I'm learning that those two things don't cancel each other out. They just sit side by side, like two people on a bus who don't need to talk.

So I think I finally understand that morning. Why I woke up before I'd slept. Why I couldn't tell excitement from worry.

It was never really about the first day. Some part of me already knew I was walking into a year where almost everything would become a last. The last first day. The last time on this bus. The last time in this room. The last ordinary Tuesday I won't think to remember.

But maybe that isn't only a sad thing to know. Most lasts slip past in disguise. This year, for once, I can see them coming.

So maybe tomorrow I'll lean a little further in the back middle row, just enough to catch the strip of road going by. Maybe I'll notice how the light falls across the desks in a room that will someday hold someone else. Maybe, when my friends laugh at something that isn't that funny, I'll listen to the whole thing.

I can't make this year stay. I've mostly accepted that. But on that first morning, I was awake before I had even slept, and I didn't know why.

Now I think I do. Something in me was already trying to pay attention.

This year, I'm going to let it.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is an esteemed platform celebrating the artistry of words and expression. This competition invites participants from around the world to share their creative voices across various genres, offering a unique space for emerging and established writers alike to showcase their talents and connect with a global community of literary enthusiasts.

Thank you, Izianne Tish Berjamin, for sharing your evocative essay "Last First" with us as part of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Your reflections on the passage of time and the complexity of change resonate deeply, offering readers a meaningful perspective on the journey through senior year. We appreciate your contribution and wish you continued inspiration in your writing endeavors.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.