Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 10 student in Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
What Jonas had seen was not his to have seen. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time in the most ordinary way — cutting through the carpark behind the supermarket on his way home, headphones in, not looking for anything — and he had seen something he could not unsee. He did not tell anyone. He was not sure he could explain it, and he was not sure, in the days that followed, what explaining it would achieve. The person he had seen was someone he recognised but did not know well. He had no proof of anything. He had only what he had seen, which was enough to change how he thought about certain things but not enough, he judged, to act on. The carrying was a specific weight. It was not guilt, because he had not done anything wrong. It was not fear, although there was some of that. It was closer to the weight of a piece of information that belonged to someone else and that you did not know how to return. He was in possession of something he had not asked for and could not easily put down. The months that followed were ordinary in almost every respect. He went to school, he played sport, he spent time with people who did not know what he was carrying. He was not unhappy. But the thing was there in the way that things are there when they do not resolve: not always in focus but always in the peripheral range of what he was aware of. A year later, the situation he had witnessed resolved itself in a way that had nothing to do with him, which was the outcome he had half-hoped for and which felt, when it came, surprisingly inadequate. He had carried the thing for a year and now there was nowhere to put it. What he came to understand — though he was not sure he could have articulated it at the time — was that some things cannot be put down, only gradually made lighter. He had not chosen to carry this. He was carrying it anyway, and the weight, he found, did change over time. Just not as much as he had hoped.