"We are broken boys from broken families who somehow managed to come together. We are late night car rides, back seats of Volvos, and we are windows down no matter how cold. We are products of our past, making our future, but we are living for what we have right now. We are McDonald’s and French fries and dollar menu stomachaches, gallons of Mountain Dew and shared drinks and shared songs. We are music, lyrics, feelings and songs. We are guitars and strings and frustration and tears, broken strings, broken words, broken souls fixed with songs from people who know where we’ve been. We are fathers and memories and memories of fathers, we are not forgetting, always holding on, only letting go of things that shouldn’t matter. We are from families that taught not by example and instead let us learn the hard way, but for that we are still thankful. We are thankful to have learned at all. We are long walks and long rivers and long silences with long thoughts that lead to short words that mean everything. We are entwined fingers, entwined hearts, connected eyes and one soul. We are living for each other. We are best friends with best friends and two of four people who still feel like kings. We are dances and matching shoes and I don’t want the world to see me, I just want you to know who I am. We are making fun of movies and falling in love all over again over every song from our youth. We are cigarette scars and torn up fingers and the kisses against them, permanent memories of pain that has long since left. We are the future’s souvenirs of how things used to be, and we are examples of strength and dependence and I just need you more than I can say. We are notebooks and writing and emotion on paper, we are typed conversations telling everything, teasing us with distance. We are all night phone calls, sometimes fun, sometimes a lifeline. We are our hands, we hold us together, we are the strength I have to say this: We are our world. Our world is beautiful." - Ryan Ross