Topknots.

Clichés are good, I think. You can say something that everyone understands and lead up to it with, "I know it's cliché, but..." and then no one can make fun of you. Or you can just say it and everyone can laugh at you, but you don't have to use too many words. They're perfect, obviously. I walk around shouting things like, "Ah, to be young and foolish!" and "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" because we are a cliché. 

But we're also not a cliché. We've a voice of our own, huh? We've words of our own, yeah? We've got a voice on paper, at least, right? We have great word choice, don't we? 

We're something original, sure, but we're also something not.

We're something not, because at the end of the day, we are all ears, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

But mostly we're something not because we still don't know what we've got until it's gone. Even if we're the most original, most alive, most non-cliché people on the face of the planet, we don't seem to notice until we're not. 

We don't realize that we're in love with people until they've packed their bags and hopped on airplanes, or that we like our parents until they have left us to do their job, or that we like books with paper until everyone reads on a Kindle. We don't even seem to see the people with eyes so blue they really should make you stop and stare -- until they've closed their eyes. We didn't pay attention to Kilgore Trout until Kilgore Trout stopped writing. We didn't notice that we liked their hair until they cut it. We didn't realize how much we like being healthy, how much we like each other, how much we like the sunshine, until we were sick and lonely and the rain clouds had rolled in. 

And you didn't love Joseph Gordon-Levitt until he loved Autumn and not you.

We're the elephant in the room. We're the bee's knees. We're unable to fight our way out of a paper sack and we're all bent out of shape. We're the cat's meow and the cat's pajamas and a cat nap and all other cat-related things, too, probably.

We're completely cliché, because after all of these years, we still haven't opened our own eyes to notice the colors of everyone else's, and we won't, until their eyes are gone.

Open your eyes, for heavens sake. Notice the colors. Notice the shapes of the words that you write. Notice the way your overpriced yogurt fills up your self-serve cup before you eat it. Notice the way the bass guitar carries the songs that you sing along to. Notice the way Mojgani's voice carves out his words, because you are his words, and you are my words, too, and everyone else's words, because we're just a product of a whole bunch of words, but you've never even noticed that, have you? So notice it. Notice it because Mojgani's words will be gone. Notice it because mine will be gone and yours will be gone and everybody else's words will be gone, too, and then we'll realize what we had. 

I'd tell you to not let them go, but I if I did that, you might never notice you were holding them. 

So let them go, maybe. Maybe then we'll notice.

"So much in these few words."

All my love,

Addy

P.S. Megan B: www.weheartit.com -- try it. Good pictures. Great pictures. And also dumb pictures, but it's worth sifting through.