Happiness is a sad song by Janis Joplin or leaves dying because happiness is beauty. Beauty is in living, in being, and in keepin' on keepin' on. Beauty is in that smell old pickup trucks have and in that type of chocolate milk you can only buy at gas stations, the type with the darker colored cartons and the richer flavor, the type dad used to always buy to take when we went camping.

      Beauty can be in pain. Tears can be beautiful because feeling is beautiful. Feeling anything. Really feeling. A heart brimming with love and a heart split open and drained are tangible, and real, painful, beautiful, and real.

      Being real is being beautiful. Beauty is going to bed at night knowing that even though you were tired as hell, you got up in that morning, because pride is full of beauty.

      Pride is when you come home to an empty apartment, after draining your piece of shit car of its last drop of gas, only to find the refrigerator barren of food other than maybe a coke, cherry red, because that cherry coke is yours. You worked for it, you bought it, and when you drink it, it will have been yours.

      The fading carpet is yours, the room it covers is yours, and no one else's. The worn couch is yours, your toothbrush is yours; they're real, and they're beautiful. Your toothbrush is beautiful, because it's yours.

      I didn't buy my toothbrush, and it's nothing but a piece of worthless plastic. I'm getting an education, but I didn't earn it. I don't deserve anything, especially pride in what I have. I didn't work hard for my grades in high school, and I'm not working now. Everything I have has fallen into my lap and it's worthless. It's not even ugly because it's nonexistent. If I left this town, tossed some clothes in a bag, and drove across this country to a run down flat overlooking a mattress warehouse, that apartment would be more beautiful than all the castles and mansions this world has to offer. I'd find some entry level job that I'd hate, but it'd be real.