It was like being five and learning nothing lasts forever.

Because the snow eventually melted and your best friend moved away the day after he cut out a paper heart and wrote “I love you” on it. And all you were left with were soggy woodchips and a stupid piece of red construction paper that didn’t know how to play tag.

But you kept it anyway because it seemed like the thing to do

It was popping balloons and bubble gum wrappers and the last drops of water from the hose after you turned it off.  “Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes to ashes.”

It was falling down.

When you’re five you believe life is about learning to tie your shoes and you never think you’re going to grow up until you wake up one morning and are seventeen. But by then it’s too late to remind yourself to never stop believing in fairy tales and paper hearts and peter pan.

It’s getting old.

Sometimes it’s that 2am feeling that you’re human and one day your mom will die. It’s the 3am feeling that follows to remind one day  you won't wake up at all. And even though you know one day everyone who has ever known you will be gone and any memory of you will dissipate like frost on wood chips, all you can think of is how much you’ll miss drinking chocolate milkshakes or running through the grass or the smell of daffodils.

It’s knowing one day you’ll be under them.

It’s ashes and dust and everything the dead things become. The things that seep into the crevasses that you can’t see but can feel. It’s heartache and heartbreak and forgetting the words to the nursery rhymes you used to sing in your sleep.

It’s remembering that you forgot

It was finding that stupid paper heart in a box, the one that said “I love you” in purple crayon. It’s crumpling it up and throwing it away because it reminded you of snow and falling and getting old and forgetting. You threw it away because nothing lasts forever and sometimes it’s better to have something else to think about at night besides stupid, paper hearts.