The first time I got dumped was in the seventh grade. She was tall and skinny and didn’t want to do it herself. When I saw her friend approach me after school I knew something was wrong. She opened her mouth and something just clicked in my head. I sprinted away before she could finish and found my girlfriend. I told her it wasn’t working out and that we had to breakup. She told me she had already dumped me. I threw up my arms and cried technicality. Someone turned to us and said “that was the worst breakup ever.”

My breakups improved as the years went on. I was nineteen and had just headed off to Connecticut for my sophomore year. I left a girl back home in Minnesota. She was tall with black hair and dark eyes. The kind of eyes that you find after four hours of hiking in the wilderness. You’re hot, you’re sticky and you just want to quit hiking. For whatever reason your conscience kicks in, “come on, just a little further.” You push through some thick prickly bushes and there they are, the darkest, most beautiful pools of eyes you’ve ever seen. You throw off your backpack and dive in.

I remember being in love. “I’m going to marry you,” I would tell her. She would smile and look down at her shoes. “I’m going to propose to you with elephants,” I’d go on, “each elephant is going to have a word on it. “Will you marry me Vera?”; five elephants.” Well, six if you count the punctuation. She alway’s would let me finish and I would always Google where to rent cheap elephants. A few weeks into the semester my brother sent me a text. “Are you still seeing Vera?” I told him what she told me, that she wanted to give it some serious thought while we were apart. I told him that she didn’t want to rush things, because “us” was important to her. He was Facebook friends with her and said she had updated her relationship status to “in a relationship”. I told him she was just joking around, that she did that with friends. I even sent her a text poking fun at her. A few minutes later I got a reply. “His name is Greg. I’ll call you later.”

Everything came to a culmination for me while I was finishing up college. I was dating a girl who wanted too many things. At first she was lovely, but you could tell her needs just started to consume her, eat away at her from the inside. You could see it when she bit her nails, or when her eyes darted between yours and the door. I remember this looming dark cloud over our heads. Every time I looked up I could see it. Every time I looked at her I saw lightening. I would count in my head, “one-one thousand, two-one thousand.” The closer it got, the harder it was to deal with my thoughts: She’s not going to be in my life anymore. I’ll never see her again. They came like battering waves and I struggled to stay upright.

While we were still dating, I wrote a short story about my struggles with my past. One of the segments was about an ex. I told my girlfriend that I didn’t want her to read it because it was too personal. She said it wasn’t fair for me to keep secrets and that I had to share it, like it was just a toy. A few days later I sent it to her on a whim. At first, she was quiet. She didn’t say anything for months. Then one night we had a fight about something inconsequential like what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and it came out. She told me she hated that story; that she wished I had never shown it to her.

I’ve decided that my break ups are like driving off a cliff. We’re both looking at the steering wheel but nobody wants to touch it. We look at it like it’s this terrible thing. Like it’s death. She looks at it, then at me. Her eyes well. Neither of us do anything and so she starts to scowl. So I tell myself that I have to do the right thing. I grab the wheel and I pull with all of my might. And just when it looks like the car is about to avoid the cliff, she turns and looks at me. She looks at me with big, wet eyes and she says “I’m sorry.” She opens the car door and she jumps out. And I’m alone, drifting through the air.