See how they run.

We are phenomenal. We are beautiful songs and young love. We are hot water in the morning and sweaters in the fall and handwritten letters. We are beautiful views and poems that make people cry and sunshine and we are rain, too. We are the pies that actually taste good. We are youth and late nights and the first snow. We are what it is like to be a part of something and we are dancing and we are new shoes. We are good books and good hair days and good games.

We are everything beautiful and wonderful and everything happy.

But here I am, trying to protect myself from us. It isn't being happy that makes me want to protect myself: It's the knowledge that happiness can't last. It's that we will have to be noise and not music and that young love rarely lasts. We will have to be the moment that hot water runs out and everything is just icy, icy cold. We do have to be the letters that don't come and the view is sometimes just polluted. We have to be what it is to be alone and we have to be the months when there is just too much snow and no one wants it around anymore. We have to be the shoes that can't be worn anymore and the plugs that get pulled. We have to be poorly written and we have to be bad hair days and we have to be everything sad.

We do have to be everything ugly and awful and everything sad.

That's life, and sometimes I hate the thought of that. But we can't protect ourselves from happiness without protecting us from sadness, so I suppose we'd better cherish while we have it -- happiness, I mean.

And for now, we're too lovely to look away from, and I'm going to cling to that.

Happy Thanksgiving (Spanksgiving).

All my love,

Addy