Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 7 student in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia.
The old kitchen smells like burnt toast and coffee. I notice this the way you might notice a song you've heard ten thousand times: not with attention, but with the weight of repetition. Mum is wrapping the plates in newspaper. The edges of the pages crinkle under her fingers, and the sound is louder than it should be. 'That's the last of the kitchenware,' she says. She doesn't look at me. I realise, standing in the doorway, that I will not smell this smell again. Not here. The radiator clicks and pops - it does this every morning, a sound that has been the background music of my whole life in this house. I have never once thought about it. Now I know it is ending. The bench is bare. The fruit bowl that sat in the centre for seven years is gone. Wrapped in bubble wrap and stacked in a box labelled 'Kitchen - Helen's new place.' My mother's new place. Not ours. I run my fingertip across the bench and it comes away grey with dust. When did we stop living here? Not today. It happened slowly - moving boxes room by room, my mother's conversation with the real estate agent, the 'Sold' sign going up outside. But today is different. Today I walk through these rooms and realise they are not mine to walk through anymore. I go to my bedroom - still the same, at least. My posters. My books. But even these feel like ghosts of themselves. Everything here will be carefully wrapped and transported. I will unwrap them in a new room that does not know me. I sit on my bed, the one remaining piece of furniture, and I don't cry. That surprises me. I thought I would cry. Instead I feel the weight of small endings pressing down. The burnt toast smell. The radiator's morning click. The shape of afternoon light through the kitchen window. The particular way this door squeaks on its hinges. They are not gone yet. But they are leaving. And I am standing in a kitchen I will never live in again, noticing, finally, what I am losing.