Nothing Gold Can Stay. I love to read. I read an absurd amount of books and I love it because I get to think about it all the time and never get bored lost in my thoughts. I recently discovered a major drawback to this; I miss the whole world.
I realize how odd it sounds. Obviously, I haven't always existed, but I can read as far back as there has been writing. I can read about how music moved a person so deeply it brought them to tears. I can read about different time periods in which there were different forms of joy.
I was reading a book, a beautiful book written in the late 1800s, and it opened with a poem. It explained the brokenness of the world how the character could see darkness and despair in the eyes of everyone he looked at. And then, in the eighth line, it said, "But you and I were gay." And I wept.
The problem with reading so much and being experienced with constantly talking and analyzing is that I understood this on so many levels at the same time. The first is something I can't help but talk about because it's one of those things that's meaning has disappeared in the past century, the use of the word gay. Gay means lighthearted and carefree, that was its original definition. At the time the book was written, it was the only definition. I'm not mad that the term means homosexuality, that can even be viewed as a positive, I'm mad at the way people use it as a hate word. There was a time when it was a word to describe something beautiful, when something brought you a certain kind of joy and there was just no other word. I'm sure everyone has heard it used as an insult, not just making people insecure about their sexuality, which is no fault of their own and one should never be ridiculed for the pursuit of happiness, but it's also used as an insult to having certain interests as a man, again, they deserve to choose to be happy. I wept for the corruption of a once beautiful word.
I'm not saying the world didn't change for the better. In the evolution of our societies, we've gained equal rights for woman and people of color, which is a beautiful way that time has brought people together rather than driving them apart. The world used to be a very terrible place with problems that strong and resilient people worked and devoted their lives to fixing, but racism, sexism, slavery, and all sorts of horrid unmentionable things still exist, and the next century brings all sorts of new problems even with solutions to old ones. Today, we live in such a broken world, have you ever heard a girls cry herself to sleep? When I was ten, I went to a camp for just a week, and one night, a girl had felt excluded by some close friends, so she cried. She cried all night long and cried herself to sleep, and you could her sniffle in dreams, and when she woke up she sobbed until she was asleep. Her tears were not invalid, but this one of the least of these reasons to cry. The worst feeling in the world is knowing that somewhere, there's a girl crying herself to sleep. Even worse, there are probably ten thousand girls crying themselves to sleep every night, girls who would cry because they felt hated, or ugly, or helpless, or alone, because they didn't have money, because they didn't have parents, because they didn't have friends. These are the reasons, among others, that girls cry themselves to sleep at night, and since that night, when I couldn't sleep, cries would echo in my thoughts and fill me with guilt. So when I read the poem, I wept to know that the world had always been broken, and little girls had always cried themselves to sleep.
I miss when I didn't know that. When I was younger and when I was ignorant and blissful and naive and innocent and life was simple. A time when I was gay, for lack of a better word. When you were little and you blindly trusted your parents because you knew the only thing that mattered, they loved you, and you believed that bound by their love, they could never hurt you. The time before you had the capacity to bully in elementary school, when you were too innocent to even know how to be cruel. A time when you would smile whenever anybody else did not because you were happy, but because you were so pure you could feel joy from miles away. The times when you suddenly feel sad when you stepped on a crack two days previously and are worried about your mother. These are the times when we think we are foolish and just simply impressionable, but these are the times when we feel wrong doing strongly and can see it clearly without the complications we add in as we mature. I wept for the fading of the innocent child I used to be, a person I miss.
Reading means you can miss the things you never saw. You can mourn because you'll never hear the song that changed a man's life two hundred years ago. You stay awake at night thinking about girls who lived and died and cried themselves to sleep. Reading means you have to feel the pain of every injustice you read, many of which really happen. Reading means you get to know characters that are pure and watch them disappear from your conscience. Reading is something that can make you a better person and it gives you an opportunity to know feelings even when you weren't there. Still, it brings me to tears sometimes, usually out of the blue, when I think of all the beautiful things I'll never know. Nothing Gold Can Stay. Not our innocence, even good in the world dies. Evil doesn't triumph, it has it's wins and losses, sometimes the shadows block the light, sometimes a sliver of light shoots through the darkness, but the sun can't always shine on everything, and night falls.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower,
but only so an hour,
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
