Sixteen Candles

Ugh.




Dude (is it okay if I call you "dude"?), I miss being kissed. I mean, really kissed. The kind of kissing that you can feel pulse through your entire body. The kind that you never want to end. I miss that.

The last time I remember that feeling (not the forced kind, not a moment made up in my head) was sixteen year-old me. I was deathly in love with a boy. He was perfect. We were laying in bed just laughing. I was teasing him and trying to make him so uncomfortable (I believe I was teasing him about his parents sex life - don't ask. I was a weird kid). He was such a good sport and we were laughing so hard my stomach was hurting (that may have also been my jitters). We kept flip-flopping between giggling and kissing. It was one of the happiest and most tumultuous moments of my youth (admittedly, I'm still in my youth, but I often don't feel like it).

I am now almost twenty and I have not had a single moment akin to that one. I've had one boyfriend and two guys that I've dated since then, and I haven't had, not one moment that even came close to measuring up. I, for one, am so sick of waiting for the right person to come along. I realize that I am very young and considerably impatient but once you've experienced the kind of love that I have, you crave it. I want it back. If I could rewind time and go back to sixteen I would. Even if it was only to re-experience that same fleeting moment all over again.

I'm not even really sure how to end this post. This moment and this feeling hasn't quite been sown up yet. So I think I'll just leave it at that. I'll let you know if there are any updates in the future.

Tokyo Drift

You ever have a song or maybe even an album that just throws you right back to a certain place or time in your life? I say "throw" because it literally feels like it whips you back against the wall when you hear it.

I am sure this is a common experience for a lot of people, but it's something that feels like it can really rock me. It feels like I have always had a boy around. Someone I was hoping to fall in love with and whom I was hoping would fall in love with me. I wanted so badly to have a best friend. Someone who would always be there for me. So,  I would listen to their music, take an interest in their hobbies, and immerse myself in them.

Music was an especially prominent aspect of my relationship with guys in middle school and high school. It's what drew us together, and I always got on their bandwagon. Whatever it was. In high school it was A Day to Remember's "Homesick" album and a very cute boy who was obsessed with vintage muscle cars and World of Warcraft (as it turns out, more than he was interested in me). I will never forget the summer he introduced me to ADTR and the Fast and Furious series. There is even a shampoo scent that reminds me of that time.

These memories seem to haunt me more than anything. They are always filled with things that I never wish to harken back to (if I can help it). I always wonder if most people feel this way? I think it's so sad that these memories are just filled with broken promises and unfulfilled dreams, and that's why it's so painful for them to pass through my subconscious to my conscious memory.

Even now, as I write this, I'm listening to another boy's music (which happens to be amazing writing music). And when he leaves, it will hurt to listen to this album, just as it hurts to hear Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult (don't ask - I should have known the relationship was doomed when that was "our song").

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

I don't know. Oh well.

Crying in the Bathroom

"One of these days, I'm going to write a book about our family; and I am going to make quite a lot of money off of it!"

That is the threat that my parents have been enduring since I was old enough to have any kind of original or hyperbolic response to their teasing. I have been raised in one of the most hilarious and misunderstood households that you could find. Sarcasm is our love language and calling each other "dork" is a term of endearment. The phrase "don't bleed in the shark tank" was something we learned along with "look both ways before you cross the street" or "never touch a hot burner on the stove".

"Don't bleed in the shark tank" meant that you never let anyone see your weakness. If someone was teasing you and you didn't like it, the best solution was to act as though you didn't care. The more you care and the more you react, the more you were "bleeding in the shark tank". That shark tank, was our family. Which, again, sounds bad, but I swear it was actually hilarious most of the time, and it taught  me to be able to laugh at myself and also to have thicker skin (seeing as I was a pretty sensitive kid - to a fault).

I was not aware that my family was in anyway special (or more accurately: peculiar) until I started spending time around lots of different people (i.e. when I started college). I would interact with my friends in a similar fashion to the way I did with my family. Playing around, being heavily sarcastic, and calling them idiots as a way of playing and teasing. I then (very quickly) encountered the problem that many of those kids (mostly girls) did not understand I was being funny. I learned pretty quickly that my family, and my idea of fun, may have indeed, not been very typical.

Things like my habit of crying in the bathroom all through my particularly hormonal middle school years, are the headline of jokes in my family. The problem is, when you relay these funny family stories to other people (I repeat: especially women) they tend to feel sorry for you. They act as though I had been brutally beaten or emotionally tortured. Which I personally find incredibly amusing, but I suppose, other people do not.

My dad always called it "preparing" us for life. I tend to agree with him (although that was not always the case - i.e. crying in the bathroom in middle school). As a result of my upbringing, there aren't too many things that people can say that will get to me, and there aren't too many things that I don't thoroughly believe I am capable of. My family was tough but loving, sarcastic but supportive, and obnoxious but memorable.

And I'll always have Crying in the Bathroom...

Holly Haven Drive

I don't remember getting old.

I walked out of my room tonight and looked up these high ceilings and down at this cold floor; ran my fingers along the texture of this strange wall that isn't filled with my memories. I see an unfamiliar house like an unfamiliar face looking back at me. I have moved eighteen times in my short nineteen years of life; house to house, apartment to apartment. I remember my life in segments, like cell blocks in a prison. Each memory, each stage, separated in time. Separated from one another.

But when did I get so old?

As an eleven year-old little girl I remember walking down the hallway, looking up at the ninth graders and thinking "It's not fair. It will be forever until I get to be as old as them!" Now here I am, just a couple of weeks before my twentieth birthday, and my life feels so incomplete. And in the incompleteness, I can't seem to remember how I got here. Like I fell asleep for nap one day in our beautiful house in the woods in Georgia and woke up ten-years later in a house I don't recognize, with a face I'm not sure I know anymore. I look in the mirror and I don't even know my own face.

And it's in this moment that I realize that I have the answer to my question.

I have spent so much of my life loving people who didn't love me back. I loved my dad with all my heart. He loved his alcohol addiction and cocaine habit more. I loved my brother with all my heart. He loved pretty much everyone other than me more. I loved my first boyfriend to a fault. He loved his porn addiction more. I loved my second boyfriend with everything I had left in me. He pretty much just loved himself more than me.

I want my life back.  I want my fucking life back. I got old caring about other people more than I did about myself. I got old trying to fix them and support them and do everything humanly possible not to lose them. I got old giving a shit about people who were never going to love me back.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the story. Maybe I will always look at my life in segments and the happiness I keep striving so diligently for will never come to fruition and I will keep looking in the mirror and being unsure of who I see.

Maybe that's the point.

Cherry Flavored Vodka

Recently singled, I find myself back in the vicious and imminently disappointing dating pool of my age group. So, naturally, I decided to further my deep seeded loathing of my generation by downloading the Tinder App to my iPhone (Listen, it was obviously not my choice to be single again. However, I discovered I am likely a masochist since I subjected myself to Tinder voluntarily - Judge me). 

Here are a few of my social discoveries so far:

• Having a nice body does not directly correlate with your worthiness to be in a relationship - shocker     
         a) GUYS - please take note
• Even in my texting generation - men are still not proficient communicators
• I have very limited taste in men
         a) Mostly consisting of nerds without muscle definition
         b) In other words Tinder lied to me when it promised me true love
         c) Wait, it didn't say that? WTF

For all the crap I talk, I actually have an amusingly substantial crush on a guy that I "swiped right" on. This crush, I believe, is uncomfortably reminiscent of how I would have felt about a boy in high school. I have never met this man but I keep re-reading his messages to me and my heart kinda skips when I see his name pop up on my phone.

Oh leave me alone, I haven't lost my mind...yet. I realize that nothing will ever come of this, but I find the concept intriguing. I had a boyfriend for almost a year that didn't make feel half as excited as the little man that lives in my phone. Either that says something very odd about my ex or about our technological age..or both. Or maybe it just says something about me.

In conclusion, Tinder is akin to cherry flavored vodka - gross but amusing.

Here we find the little chubby girl in high school again..

I swear to everything that I promised myself I would never attempt to write another "blog" after my ninth grade year of high school. Believe me, I know it's borderline pathetic (and by borderline I mean, way south of the border). But, I feel the need to join the leagues of my fellow self-involved millennials, that believe whatever is in their brains should, of course, be shared with the entire world. As if anyone out there gives a shit what I think, feel, or say.

However, as a true 20 something, I would like to believe I have something to say, even if just to myself..