Expired.

To all the beautiful people who have graced 
every phase of my life,

I'm glad to have called you a friend.

In the revolving door of life time always runs out. There's expiration dates on our bottled water, our credit cards, even our makeup. If the items we use everyday will eventually fail, disappoint, or simply spoil, what can we expect from the things we really count on?

It's inevitable, some day your car will break down, your best friend will move away, and someone who meant the world to you will die. It sounds harsh but we all know this is the way life works, and still we fight so hard to preserve the inevitable expiration dates of life. We get tune ups, face lifts, and shrinks to sustain the shelf life of the things we come so desperately to rely on. Even though we know the odds are stacked against us that we won't look 21 forever and our significant others will probably fall in line with the rest and leave us unfulfilled... we try,try again.

Our bodies and relationships didn't come with lifetime guarantees. The wear and tear that we put ourselves and each other through everyday begins to show. We toss out rotten bananas, jeans that don't fit, or a once upon a time friend. The constant cycle of fresh starts is never ending. But how many of us will put those bananas in the freezer in hopes of banana bread one day? Why is it so easy to put the jeans you can't zip up back in the drawer and so hard to say goodbye to a friend?

Times change, people grow up, and eras end. The memories of a reality that once was seem miles away at times. People come in and out of your life constantly changing its course and changing you. And then their time is up. Used within 6 months of opening- that friend was true to their claim. When you live a life that some could label a phase it's inevitable that people will come in and out of your life faster than you'd like. We live in a world where the opportunities for a new freshness guarantee are too vast, too frequent.

In the time constraints of life there are always end dates. Nothing is forever, but as Semisonic once sang, "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." We know that some slices of time are the best if used by-type and others are laced with more preservatives. So even though the chapters of our lives and the people wondering in and out of them may be perishable, life still tastes pretty damn good.