I’ll always remember that summer five years ago, when my friend and I sat along the harbor in a country hundreds of miles away from our own and she turned to me and asked, “What if we never get this moment back?” I’ll always remember how I already knew the answer: We won’t.

I knew we’d have to walk away from the harbor. I knew we’d have to fly back home. I knew she had to move across the country and I’d stay in our old town alone. I knew everything would change, because that’s what life does—it flows forward. It moves on. It is constantly transforming, and it alters us along with it. Even if we could return to that very same place and sit along the water in that very same way, we wouldn’t be the same. 

I didn’t tell her that, though. There’s something terrifying about saying it out loud, about acknowledging the truth that even the best moments of our lives eventually become part of the past. But what I wish I could go back and tell her now is this: No matter what happens, we’ll always have this summer.

We’ll have the sun in our hair and the water against our bare feet. We’ll have the wind playing with the hems of our skirts and the feeling of magic in the air. And we’ll have each other, laughing over jokes we know someday we won’t remember but that fill us up with so much happiness right now. In this moment, all of this is ours.

And maybe someday we’ll look back and feel like we lost something. Maybe we’ll mourn the fact that we can’t go back and relive it all again. But it feels like such a disservice to overlook how lucky we are to have ever had the chance to experience it in the first place. 

The truth is, life is too short to always be looking forward. We can’t predict the future; we don’t know the ways the world will change us over time. But that’s why it’s so important to hold onto these moments when we have them, to give ourselves over to them completely. To laugh when you want, to dance when you feel the urge, to love with abandon. To cry when you need to and recognize that even these difficult times deserve to be honored. When you let yourself truly exist within a moment, the idea of what happens next starts to feel a little less overwhelming, because you finally understand that this is what matters—right here, right now.

Because I was right—I haven’t returned to that harbor. I haven’t even seen my friend in years. The world has changed in so many ways since those halcyon days, and so have I. But five years later, I still look back and think: Even if everything is different now, even if we will never get it back, at least we had that summer. It means everything to me.