The river keeps keeping its name

I recently visited a place once very significant and warm, a fountain of great friendship and of so much laughter. And yes, the steps and the voices did echo, memories did flood, the bird did urge speed etc. But there was something else in that experience too, in a place so intimately recalled: something less sweet and more real. It is not that nostalgia should be automatically bad, just that it is automatically inaccurate. The sharpness, the vividness of experience, of the moment, is forgotten, that feeling of living poised on top of a great roaring wave of time with always the fear of crashing down, of drowning. Yes, those good things were true, they did happen, but that is just a part of that experience, at the time it was no fountain, it was life.