if I ship You & I more than me & a celebrity, you know it’s real

• I miss you!
• I hope you’re doing well.
• We need to catch up!
• I’ve been meaning to call you.

Civil niceties aside, don’t feed me that shit.

You do not miss me. I know when someone misses me because they say it sincerely. Obviously, there are some people who genuinely and legitimately miss me, and I always appreciate hearing it. But I know when it’s complete and utter bullshit. If you never say a single word to me except when you run into me at church or on the street, you don’t miss me. If you hit me up only when you need something, you don’t miss me. If you never bother to text me on my birthday, you damn well do not miss me. Obviously I appreciate hearing it, but only when you mean it. Saying it just because you think I want you to say it makes me feel trashy; I feel like I’m standing on the side of the freeway with a cardboard sign that says “I wish someone missed me” and you’re giving me a sympathy I miss you because you feel like you owe me something. You don’t owe me anything.

Saying you hope I’m doing well is the only sentence I want to hear from most people. You hope I’m doing well. This is the best because even if you don’t mean it, there’s a sense of honesty that comes with it. You hope. Because you sure as hell don’t know. Knowing would imply that you actually bother to care what’s going on in my life. Saying you hope I’m doing well, whether it’s sincere honesty or completely falsified bullshit, is the only thing you’re allowed to say to me. But don’t say it if it’s obvious that you couldn’t give a shit either way. You don’t owe me that. You don’t owe me anything.

I hate when people say we need to catch up after not saying a word to me for an entire school quarter, or longer. If we haven’t talked in two or three weeks, a month even, then yes, we need to catch up. If we actually have conversation and you bother to stay informed on the happenings in my life, then yes, we need to catch up. But if you’re saying five words to me for the first time in almost three months, they sure as shit better not be we need to catch up. We do not need to catch up. We do not need to catch anything. You don’t owe me anything.

I only believe that people say that they’ve been meaning to call you if they need to catch up with you, or tell you something urgently. In which case, they’ll proceed to tell me what they were calling for, or they’ll make plans to arrange when they can tell me what they were calling for. But don’t say you’ve been meaning to call me if you’ve never even shot me a text message since the last time you talked to me, which was most likely ages ago. But I will say that I prefer saying you meant to call me than lying and saying that you called and I didn’t answer. Because that would be some bullshit. If I see that I have a missed call, I’ll return it within twenty-four hours, unless I truly honestly did not see it. But I don’t delete calls, so I will literally whip out my phone and check for your missed call. So don’t try and be polite by saying you meant to call me if it’s blatanly obviously that you didn’t. You don’t owe me your friendship, I don’t require it from you. You don’t owe me anything.

You don’t.

I believe in love like I believe in God: you can’t touch it, you can’t see it, but you can feel its wrath.

A Lilo & Stitch Relationship

Everyone wants to have that “Fairytale Romance” that can be compared to a Disney movie, or a Nicholas Sparks novel, or any other romantic comedy. When I was in high school, during my first ever relationship, I asked her a question that most people think about at some point or another. “If we were a Disney movie, which one would we be?”
She thought about it and gave me the temporary response, “I’ll tell you later. I need to think about this.” I realized how spontaneous and random the question was, so I agreed to the postponement of its answering. I walked her to class and then went to class myself.
After my class finished, it was time for lunch. I went to go “pick her up” from her classroom, and we walked to our usual lunch table. Upon arrival, we sat down on our usual bench and she turned to me as she said, “I figured out which Disney movie you and I would be.”
I made the assumption that she would’ve said one of the Disney Princesses, and I imagined the reasons she would give behind her choice.
Mulan, maybe, because she was the one who had to do all of the hard work.
Sleeping Beauty, perhaps, because it took me long enough.
Beauty and the Beast…well, that would’ve been self-explanatory.

I would’ve even settled for Tarzan because at least Jane fell in love with him for the right reasons, despite the fact that he was raised my gorillas.
Regardless of what I thought, I was not expecting the answer I was given.

She smiled and me and excitedly answered, “Lilo & Stitch.”

At first I laughed, assuming that she was playing a joke on me. After a few seconds, I realized that she was dreadfully serious. As this fact dawned on me, I quickly questioned, “I’m the dog?!” She immediately began laughing, not because she was joking but because I reacted in the way that I did.

We discussed this for a couple of minutes and I pointed out the obvious flaws in the storyline that would arise, as well as the reasons that they bothered me.

Lilo and Stitch weren’t actually in love, they were family; Lilo was much too young to even be considered a Disney princess; Lilo and Stitch is a movie about family, not about love; Stitch is a dog. You know, the obvious ones.

After much discussion, she refused to change her answer. The justification she gave in the end was that “No matter what happened, Stitch always loved Lilo.” That, and the fact that “Everyone thought Stitch was weird but Lilo wanted him anyways.”

And yes, I will admit it: that’s kind of cute. But that didn’t change the fact that Stitch was Lilo’s dog. There was no way that anything romantic could ever come up between the two of them because Stitch was a dog. Not even that, Stitch was an alien from another world that Lilo adopted. I was looking to date this girl, not be her pet.

But over the next few weeks, despite the fact that this conversation was resolved and wasn’t even brought up for almost two years, I did some thinking about what I could draw from this conclusion that my best friend and I were Lilo & Stitch. I also did some thinking about what that would mean for the type of relationship we had.

What exactly was a Lilo & Stitch relationship?

But then I started to think about the relationship that the two of them had; because if you leave out the fact that Stitch is an alien from another planet who lives with Lilo and her sister, they actually do have the perfect foundation for a true love story.

Lilo and Stitch meet at a time in their lives where both of them desperately need each other; Lilo because she doesn’t have friends, and Stitch because he’s being chased by intergalactic police. They develop a strong bond that is impossible to break and they become inseparable best friends, despite all of the odds stacked against them. Lilo teaches Stitch how to function on Earth with the rest of society, and he teaches her how to be herself.

The two of them also wreak complete havoc together; they wander around the island without any parental supervision and they encounter complete strangers along the way. Then Gantu, that giant shark-alien-thing, shows up to try and arrest Stitch. He ends up burning the house down, if I remember correctly. So, in summation, the two of them make unexpected things happen, to say the least.

Then Lilo gets mad at Stitch, and he has to leave because she hates him. Once again, I could see the parallels between our friendship because it had gone through some rough patches, just like all relationships do. During that scene, though, Stitch remembers The Ugly Duckling and says, “I’m lost.”

That scene, by the way, is still one of the saddest scenes in an animated movie about an alien, ever.

But the point of this scene is that Stitch thought he was starting to figure out who he was, what his purpose was, and the reason behind his existence. And then he had to leave Lilo and he was lost without her. He didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know how to handle it, so he did the only thing he could think of, which was to say, “I’m lost.”

After this, something happens that I really can’t ever remember. But I know something happens and then Lilo gets captured and tossed in the spaceship instead of Stitch. So, what does Stitch do? He steals an eighteen-wheeler and starts chasing the spaceship. Now, let’s think about this. What are the odds that Stitch is going to catch a flying spaceship by driving one of the most obstructive vehicles known to man? I’ll tell you: they’re next to impossible. But he doesn’t let that stop him. Nothing stops him from getting to her when she needs him.

And in the end, Stitch saves her. He gets to stay with her and Nani, and they live happily ever after as one giant family. But then there was that second one, where he had a glitch and he was getting bad and all that stuff. I don’t remember all of that movie, but I know that Stitch dies or something.

No worries, he comes back to life; but before he does Lilo feels bad because she was super preoccupied with her Hula contest or something. And she was too busy to notice that Stitch needed her, and she cries because he’s dead. Or something.

And then there was that television show where they tried to capture all of the other 625 experiments because their dehydrated pods all got wet or something. But the two of them had some pretty hardcore adventures during the series, too. They faced everything together because they knew that if they were together, they could do anything.

Basically, I started to think about all the positive things that I could have interpreted when she said that she and I had a Lilo & Stitch relationship.

Disregard the fact that they’re different species, and they’re like family, and that he’s a dog, and that she’s like seven. Look at it from a Him&Her perspective.

She and he found each other even though they were, literally, from two different planets.

She and he both came into each other’s lives in times when one (or both) of them needed the other.

She and he were both best friends.

She and he were inseparable.

She and he could make unexpected things happen, things that even they couldn’t see coming.

[She and] he were lost without the other one.

She and he would let nothing come between them and the other one.

She and he would let nothing stop them from being there when the other one needed them.

She and he fit in with each other, even when they stood out from everyone else.

She and he faced everything together.

She and he could do anything if they did it together.

She and he loved each other, no matter what happened or what came between them.

And she and he lived happily ever after together.

So yes, it’s not a typical Disney movie romance. There are no princes, no princesses, no curses, no songs sung by the characters themselves, and there are an awful lot of aliens tossed into the mix.

But there are two characters who find each other across a galaxy. There are two characters who help each other fit in together, because they stand out alone. And there are two characters who love each other, regardless of what happens and in spite of all the reasons they shouldn’t.

Yes, Lilo & Stitch was definitely not what I imagined her response would be when I asked her that question. And I doubt that she put this much thinking into the decision she made, but that doesn’t change the fact that I did.

So, while Lilo & Stitch might not be a love story, it definitely is a story about love and how we should love.

If you ask me, I definitely wouldn’t mind a Lilo & Stitch relationship.

I finally figured it out.

Don’t read this.

Unless you really want to.

There once was a day
That you told me you loved me
You’re so full of shit

You and I were once
Two souls united as one
And now we are not

"The truth is, not every love story can have a happy ending, right? And when that happens, then people like me need to forget about our love and move on."

Cluttered.

My life is so messy right now. So many things need to be cleaned.

Rearranged, sorted, replaced, and removed.

I take care of things and people that return the favor and take care of me in some way, shape, or form. Cliche as that phrase is, it’s true.

Sometimes, the things we want to hold on to the most are the things that we need to rid ourselves of.

I’m not afraid to let things go. I’m afraid to hold on.

It’s about time I stopped being so afraid of things.