Nothing Gold Can Stay

About three and a half years ago I met a group of people who became my best friends. We were young and in love with the idea of ourselves and of adventure. We met in a church in the middle of no where but in the center of our separate ways. It took a while for us to grow on each other but eventually we were inseparable (until of course we were separated). This friendship may be one of the most pure and honest things I've experienced. Or maybe that's just how I chose to remember. Either way it was beautiful, though it couldn't last. Time started to erode the very fabric of our friendship, so that one day we no longer recognized who each other had become and that safety we felt in the company of one another was gone. It didn't end in hatred or anger it was simply the natural order of things.
One of the boys in this group and I fell in love and began a relationship that lasted two years. We talked of marriage and children and our futures running wild doing nothing at all but living. We taught each other what it meant to love and the meaning of compassion. He became my life and I became his. But one day we were talking not about our future but about our end. We still felt all the love we ever had, if not more. Yet it ended. That is just how life is.
Every good thing I've experienced has died, but new ones always surface. We all have pieces of beauty in our lives that slowly fade, only leaving room for us to find new ones, better suited love for our changing being. The key to finding the new is to letting go of the old. But what if the new will never compare to what you once had? What if every friendship, every lover, will forever be tainted by the memory of the past? Can you ever truly love like you did when you were young and naive and unafraid? When the future was all you had and the past held little more than your childhood?
I want to visit those bright places in my memory of little concern and high hopes. But there is no way back.  He can't take me back there, I know this with everything inside of my mind but I still believe it not to be true. He was my first and I could never change that. I never would.
Maybe what I need to realize is that nothing good will last but there is beauty in both the beginning and the end. I need to rejoice in the birth and the death of the day.
New things always come.
They already have.