Skinny love

"We dated and she's an incredibly important person that I lived with for a long time, but it's about that time in a relationship that I was going through: you’re in a relationship because you need help, but that’s not necessarily why you should be in a relationship, and that's skinny. It doesn’t have any weight. Skinny love doesn't have a chance because it's not nourished"

- Bon Iver

As time has progressed and as I reflect on the numerous experiences that I have had and the various experiences that I have heard about others having, it has become evident that our generation is very good at taking what they need from people when it comes to love and commitment and then completely disregarding the person when it suits them.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m really not down with people getting into relationships for the wrong reasons and I’m also really hesitant when it comes to relationships. I have this attitude that when you get involved with someone or you start dating someone, you should be able to imagine getting married to that person. I know this may be a really serious attitude to possess considering that we’re so young, but why would you get involved with someone if you have no intention of envisioning a future with them? I feel like when you get into a relationship it should be because you know yourself and are happy enough with yourself to know that you can exist as a single entity without being dependent on another person.

I’ve noticed that many people my age do not share this opinion that I harbor. Those that know me know that I really hate to be wrong, and I have a hard time admitting when I am wrong. When I look back on all the guys that I have been involved with it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because I’m forced to admit that I was wrong about them and each and every one of them had made me compromise my attitude toward relationships.

I think that every relationship that I’ve had over the past few years has changed me in some way or the other whether it be for the good or the bad.  Even though I may harbor various negative feelings toward most of the guys that I’ve been with I am appreciative of every single one of them as the experiences that I have had with them have allowed me a broader outlook on the topic of love. Being with them has taught and revealed to me what I want in a relationship, as well as what I don’t want in a relationship.

Over the past few months I’ve been struggling with the fact that people choose to tell you what you want to hear instead of what they really feel.  I struggle with the fact that people feel the need to make you fall for them, when they have no intention of pursuing you. I always look at these girls that fall for guys really fast and I genuinely feel bad for them because the heartbreak that they’re forced to endure after finding out that they’re just “a side chick” or the guy “just wants to be friends” is not something that a girl deserves to feel especially after a short period of time spent getting to know someone. Many people would criticize these girls but when I look at it from a broader perspective is it really that bad that someone actually felt maybe for once a guy came around that was different?

On the topic of skinny love and in reference to the title of this post, I think that it’s fair to make the conclusion that our generation’s outlook on love is governed by skinny love. I say this because I’ve seen how we get into unhealthy relationships which end up in tears and heartbreak as the one party takes while the other party gives. We get into relationships because we’re lonely and not because we’re ready and we feel that it’s okay to exploit each other’s feelings and not be accountable for our actions.

Personally, I think that being in love as a teenager sucks. I mean, very rarely do you find a guy that’s willing to settle down and invest in a relationship. Many people ( including myself) have this idea about love being perfect and being ever so consuming and I honestly believe that this love does exist, it just doesn’t exist at our age because our generations outlook on love is governed by skinny love, “it doesn't have a chance because it's not nourished”

Trust.

TRUST 

A glass ball that is thrown around by various holders. It passes from one person to another, in its fragile delicate state. It has the ability to shatter into a million pieces, and once shattered serves unable to be remolded. To hold this valuable ball even just for a few minutes you have to earn it, it’s like the jackpot at the casino. Very few are fully able to delight in it.

Trust is earned.

I'm not someone that trusts easily as I’ve had various experiences where I’ve learned that when you openly hand out your trust to someone, very often they will take advantage of it and you’ll be left with nothing more than a handful of trust issues.

I believe that trust should not be awarded to all and it should not be forced as it is something that should be seen as a prize rather than something that someone is entitled to.

As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I recently became a legal eagle. I find myself wanting to do certain things that I haven’t yet experienced just so I can experience them and form my own opinions of them rather than learn from other peoples experiences, but I find that my parents are holding me back. It is frustrating as they feel as though it's okay to deny me certain things and treat me as if I’m a child when I’m growing up in a world where at the age of 18, many are called to be adults.

It angers me that they feel the need to reprimand me and spit out words that label me untrustworthy, irresponsible and unobservant; as I have proved to them time and time again that I am none of those things.

I don’t think that I’d ever be able to lie to my parents. I know this is on another level of cheesy but if I lied about where I was going I would probably be so paranoid that my dad would show up out of the blue and ground me for life.

I find that my parents don’t appreciate this quality that I possess, this faint need to be completely honest with them about everything. Unlike other children, I don’t lie about where I’m going, I don’t do drugs and I don’t hang out with dodgy people, I’m generally just a good child yet they still feel the need to keep me on a tight leash and treat me as though I can’t be trusted.

I know that trust serves as a basis for any relationship.

When it comes to romantic relationships I’ve learned that very often we carry over our trust issues from one relationship to the other. Even though we know that it is not right, we end up convicting our current partners for mistakes that have been made by our exes.

From my own experiences I’ve learned that once you fully trust someone, the love that you have for them knows no boundaries. When you gather up the strength to finally trust someone, I can vouch that you feel incredibly invincible. You feel on top of the world with that person and it feels as though you are high on life, living in cumulus clouds.

But what happens when this trust is broken? The invincibility that you once possessed is no longer existent as are the cumulus clouds. (Anti-climax eh?)

Anyways, as human beings it is generally a struggle to trust people, seeing as we are as messed up as we are. I do however believe that everyone deserves to be trusted until they give you a definite reason not to trust them. No one deserves to pay for someone else’s mistakes because it’s just that, it’s someone else’s mistakes.

I believe that if I tell myself this enough times, if I tell myself that “No one deserves to pay for someone else’s mistakes” over and over again, then maybe one day I will be able to put this into motion, maybe one day I will be able to trust without restrain and allow people the chance to make their own mistakes rather than be convicted for mistakes that have been made by others. According to Ernest Hemingway “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody, is to trust them.”

Cheers to the teenage years

“I think being a teenager is such a compelling time period in your life--it gives you some of your worst scars…”

-    Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide

Life.

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on us, it has the ability to let us down and proceed without even the slightest feeling of guilt, it relishes at turning our lives completely upside down and finds enjoyment in giving us a reality check just after we've paid it a compliment stating that maybe we were wrong, maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.

The teenager years can be compared to a sweet before you’ve eaten it. It looks perfect. It's perfectly round, it has a soft sweet center that you can’t wait to devour, and the bright red color entices you and makes you think that once you've tasted it you won’t be able to get enough.

You can compare this to how you felt when you were younger. How you couldn’t wait to grow up and be a teenager because it seemed so much more appealing than being a simple 7 year old. To you, life was way too boring back then, you wanted the rush that came with being in your teens, and you yearned for freedom and responsibility. The teenage years - the "soft sweet center that you couldn’t wait to devour"

Anxiously and slowly you lift the sweet to your mouth, easing it in as you wish to savor the sweet taste and not finish it immediately. When it hits your tongue, you suck on it and immediately you want nothing more than to spit it out.

You realize that the sweet that you expected to be perfect was never really perfect to begin with; the appealing look was a facade, it was glamorized to be something that you wished it to be, just like the teenage years

.

When older people reflect on their teenage years, very often you hear of the good things: how your mom met your dad in high school and how he expected very little from her, how they would play in the road and everyone knew everyone because of the community structure, how they enjoyed school and were anxious and excited to learn. 

They choose to omit the bad times, the times when they sat in their rooms crying because they found out their friends were speaking behind their backs, the heartbreaks, the pressure, the failures, the temptations, the fake friends. What about all of those bad things that make living life for us teenagers unbearable?

I think of most of my friends at school and I realized that the topic of conversation almost every break consists of us complaining. We complain about being tired, we complain about the exams that are creeping, we complain that our parents won’t let us go out; we complain that we don’t have money. We complain…. and complain.

Can you really blame us? Life has become so routine. We go to school, we come home, we do school work, after which we go to bed and wake up the next day only to repeat this tiring cycle.

As it sits I’m really fed up with life, and more importantly I’m fed up with life as a teenager. I know that I have no right to feel this anger towards life because it owes me no favors; I realize that I am more of a liability to it than I am an asset and I give it nothing in return for what it has given me.

I know it may come across as if I’m ungrateful toward life and as if I’m taking it for granted when many people have not had the opportunity to live to my age, but that is not the case. I really am grateful to be alive and I am grateful that I am healthy. I am grateful that life has enjoyed my company enough to allow me to live to experience the teenage years while many have not been awarded this opportunity. 

After experiencing these dreadful years first hand, I feel that I have earned the right to say that being a teenager is fucking hard. People don’t understand what we as a generation have to endure, especially in today’s day and age. You hear of so many young people ending their lives when they are our age because life just becomes too much to bear, even death seems appealing.

If you are reading this, I commend you for sticking around. The teenager years are not for the faint hearted so award yourself a huge-ass-filled-with-love hi-five for being strong enough to endure all the heartbreaks, the pressures, the failures, the temptations and the fake friends.

If you are not proud of yourself for anything, be proud of yourself for dealing with things that could easily have been escaped. You are amazing, and you my friend, are a badass.

Stay put, we're nearly done with this shit and by "this shit" I am referring to the teenage years. Because that's exactly what it is: SHIT.

Cheers to better days in the future x 

"To the girl who works at starbucks down the street from my house on Delmont Heights Road, I swear to God I’m not a stalker" - Rudy Francisco

A beautiful piece of writing, I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't share it

"When I asked you for a chai latte, what I meant to say was, “I was walking past. I saw you in the window. I only came in here because I had to know what your voice sounded like, but instead of saying that, I just got really nervous and ordered the first thing on the menu. I don’t even know what the fuck chai is, or a latte for that matter. When God made you, he cussed for the first time. He turned to an angel, gave him a high five, and said ‘God damn, I’m good.’ You’re that beautiful. I spent the last five days trying to figure out how I’m gonna introduce myself to you properly and I think I finally figured it out. It’s gonna be something like… ‘hi’. That’s all I got so far. But I think it’s a good start. You see, I want that, 

I want that, ‘my friends think I’m crazy’ kind of love. 
That ‘reckless’ kind of love. 
That ‘wake up early make you breakfast’ kind of love. 
That, ‘crack open my life and say look, you gotta see this’ kind of love. 
Forget the shallow stuff, I want the deepest kind of love. 
That ‘I want to stay up late and tell you all my secrets’ kind of love. 
That every time I see you walk on pieces kind of love. 
I want that ‘stand next to me’ kind of love. 
That ‘it’s by destiny’ kind of love. 
That ‘no matter what happens to me, you’ll always get the best of me’ kind of love. 
That ‘you get my heart and my mind, this world gets the rest of me’ kind of love. 
That ‘invest in me’ kind of love, because ‘you already know that I’m invested in you’ kind of love. 
That ‘you come home upset, and you don’t have to say nothing, I already know what to do’ kind of love. 
I want, love.

I want you to bite my lip until I can no longer speak, and then suck my ex-girlfriend’s name out of my mouth just to make sure she never comes up in our conversations. I want you to come to me like an afternoon- Come to me slowly as if you were a broken sunset with a lazy sky on your shoulders. If you let me be sunlight, I promise that I will penetrate your darkness until you speak in angel ways. Pull me close to you, tell me that you love me, then scratch your future into my back, so I can be everything that you live for. I promise that I will die for you daily, and then resurrect in your screams. I promise that I will love you. I promise, that I will love you as if it’s the only thing that I’ve ever done correctly x

A lot like you - Rudy Francisco

A lot like you

A poem written by Rudy Francisco

I was told

The average girl begins to plan her wedding at the age of 7

She picks the colors and the cake first

By the age of 10

She knows time,

And location

By 17

She’s already chosen a gown

2 bridesmaids

And a maid of honor

By 23

She’s waiting for a man

Who won’t break out in hives when he hears the word “commitment”

Someone who doesn't smell like a Band-Aid drenched in lonely 

Someone who isn’t a temporary solution to the empty side of the bed

Someone

Who’ll hold her hand like it’s the only one they've ever seen

To be honest

I don’t know what kind of tux I’ll be wearing 

I have no clue what my wedding will look like

But I imagine

The women who pins my last to hers

Will butterfly down the aisle

Like a 5 foot promise

I imagine

Her smile

Will be so large that you’ll see it on google maps

And know exactly where our wedding is being held

The woman that I plan to marry

Will have champagne in her walk

And I will get drunk on her footsteps

When the pastor asks

If I take this woman to be my wife

I will say yes before he finishes the sentence

I’ll apologize later for being impolite

But I will also explain him

That our first kiss happened 6 years ago

And I’ve been practicing my “Yes”

For the past 2, 165 days

 When people ask me about my wedding

I never really know what to say

But when they ask me about my future wife

I always tell them

Her eyes are the only Christmas lights that deserve to be seen all year long

I say

She thinks too much

Misses her father

Loves to laugh

And she’s terrible at lying

Because her face never figured out how to do it correctly

I tell them

If my alarm clock sounded like her voice

My snooze button would collect dust

I tell them

If she came in a bottle

I would drink her until my vision is blurry and my friends take away my keys

If she was a book

I would memorize her table of contents

I would read her cover-to-cover

Hoping to find typos

Just so we can both have a few things to work on

Because aren’t we all unfinished?

Don’t we all need a little editing?

Aren’t we all waiting to be proofread by someone?

Aren’t we all praying they will tell us that we make sense? 

I don’t know when I will be married

I don’t know where I will be married

But I do know this

Whenever I’m asked about my future wife

I always say

…She’s a lot like you

To the new boyfriend - Rudy Francisco

To the new boyfriend

A poem by Rudy Francisco

"To the random dude who started dating my ex-girlfriend two days after we broke up,

yes, i saw that shit on facebook.

Now when i realized that you were in a relationship with a girl that i thought i’d someday spend the rest of my life with,

I walked outside, i said to myself “there’s no way Ashton Kutcher’s gunna catch me off guard,"

I waited forty-five minutes.

& then i realized, that there hasn't been a new episode of Punk'd in damn near four years..

So i guess i’m the only practical Joke in this entire situation.

One, The first time i saw you & her in a picture,

I wanted to take my entire arm, shove it inside of the computer, & snatch the happiness right off of your face.

Two, If i ever see you in the street…

I’m probably going to punch you in the throat.

Three, I apologize in advance.

& I know that it makes no sense to have this much anger toward a man that I've never actually met face to face,

But my definition of Love, is being robbed in an alley eight times in a row

& hoping there’s something about today that makes all of this different.

There is nothing logical, about cutting off the most important parts of yourself

& then putting them inside of hands

that Shake,

that Tremble,

that Crack like a hayashen sidewalk.

Four, There is nothing rational about love.

Your love stutters when it gets nervous,

Your love trips over its own shoelaces,

Love, is clumsy & my heart refuses to wear a helmet.

Five, cupid is fucking irresponsible,

& i’m tired of him using me for target practice.

Six, I was told that time would heal all wounds.

But what exactly do you do on days when it feels like the hands on your clock have arthritis.

Seven, She always wore her heart on her sleeves,

So tell me why the hell do you look so familiar.

Eight, I think i’ve seen you somewhere in her smile,

Like i’ve heard your voice in her laughter,

Like i’ve smelled your cologne on her thighs,

I bet if we dusted her heart for fingerprints we would only find yours..

Nine, I have this envelope, it’s full of all the butterflies that i felt the first time she relaxed the Velcro on her lips & smiled in my direction,

I think most of them are still alive,

I guess these belong to you too.. "