We Were All New Once
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
We were all new once—
bright, uncreased,
held up to the light like something holy,
a possibility so fresh
it could almost hum.
The world felt enormous then,
like a map still blank in all the right places,
a future waiting to be filled
with versions of ourselves
we hadn’t met yet.
We believed in beginnings
as though they were promises,
as though time only moved forward
toward better things.
When we were new,
hope felt natural—
a reflex, a birthright,
a soft glow behind the ribs
that asked for nothing
but the chance to keep shining.
But everything ages.
Everything.
And in the slow, inevitable march
from “could be” to “is,”
we crack.
We tarnish.
We learn that even the brightest metals
lose their gleam
when handled by life too long.
Dreams warp under pressure.
Edges blunt.
Certainties corrode
into something that feels like doubt.
And the future—the vast, shimmering future—
shrinks until it fits
into the small places
where our fear once lived.
We were all new once,
but newness is a fragile thing.
It bruises under the weight of persistence,
it dulls with repetition,
it disappears beneath the quiet resignation
of becoming someone
we never meant to be.
The sorrow is not in the aging—
aging is inevitable,
a privilege even—
but in the knowledge
that we have sullied our own shine
just by surviving.
By continuing.
By becoming relevant
to a world that eventually forgets us anyway.
And yet—
beneath all that ruin,
beneath the rust and the weary edges,
there is still the faint echo
of who we were at the beginning.
The version of us
who looked at the horizon
and saw possibility instead of consequence.
We were all new once.
But maybe the miracle
is not that we gleamed—
but that even now,
cracked and weathered,
we still search for the light
that made us shine.
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