Seriously Single IV: Break-Ups.

Sometimes I think it’s better being single and I even considered missing both the wedding and the blind date. If you stay single there is no chance of breaking up and break ups are horrendous, unspeakable, unbearable, dire, terrible acts and occasionally an enormous relief. I would much rather be the dumper (duh, obviously) than the dumpee even though there is guilt. Luckily for me I have mostly been the dumper although karma sees to it sometimes that I get what I deserve so it all works out pretty fair in the end I guess. As it should.




Got to hate that broken hearted thing. I hate grieving for someone I like quite a bit and maybe even love and I hate feeling like the world sucks and I will never be happy. Ridiculous really that we tie up so much happiness in one person but at the time it is all we see. Like I have said before love is blind and sometimes it’s deaf. We think when we are dumped that ‘that’ person was ‘the one’. Of course there possibly really isn’t a ‘one’ but its all part of the self-pity scenario. You tell yourself you will never find another quite like that one and it’s all really tragic – at the time.


The clichés are the worst. I hate them at times like these. Your friends always sprout them off at you when crying on their shoulder because you have been discarded by your love and they have no idea what to fucking say to you.


“It wasn’t meant to be and he was an arsehole,” they say.


“There’s plenty more fish in the sea,” (yeah but they’re all carp).


“Time heals all wounds,” (but by that time gangrene has set in).


“There is a light at the end of the tunnel,” (and it’s a train coming right at you).


Oh my God. I don’t care about lights, tunnels and fish right now I just want the dumper back. But your mates are doing their best and you know you will possibly have your turn to do your best one day for them and get them back by regurgitating the same shit when they are dumped and you don’t know what the fuck to say. This thought more than any revolting cliché they come up with cheers me.


The worst part about it is getting over both the dumper and the fact that your self-esteem has taken a beating because you (of all people, you wouldn’t read about it) have been rejected. So you do that interrogating thing in your head endlessly, “What is wrong with me? What did I do? I should have been a better girlfriend.” You analyse everything you do wondering if it was this or that, that drove him away. And then you do something really stupid like forget you had no clothes on when you walk out of your apartment block (120 apartments) to the communal washing line to peg up undies, and you say to yourself, “Oh no fucking wonder. I’d dump me too”.


Time is the answer, which sucks because it goes so slowly when you are in pain. You just want to take an “I’m over you pill” and get on with your life and onto your next bonk or relationship, whatever takes your fancy as long as you have a date on national holidays and someone to go to the Royal show with.


Everything reminds you of that person. The smell left on the pillow next to yours that you don’t want to wash again, ever. The shirt that they bought you when they loved you. Every single song on the radio that came out while you were dating. Smells. Movies. Sirloin steak. The four hundred photos you have of both of you together that you have stashed under your pillow, on your bathroom mirror, on your desk at work, in your purse, and of course, car dashboard.


There is no need for physical reminders though because your every waking moment is ‘him’. Everywhere you go, there he is. Except maybe when you are drunk, although even then you feel him lurking somewhere around the fringes of your subconscious (bastard), it’s just that you are trying hard to ignore him. But when you wake up the next morning with your head screaming in pain and eyes ready to pop out of your head, the cocky cage in your mouth and bucket next to your bed (how did that get there anyway?), who is there to greet you? That’s right. It’s the dumper. And he is laughing his arse off at you and even worse, you remember something very vaguely that happened while drunk like a telephone call, tears and begging. And you scramble and look at your dialled numbers desperately (maybe I dreamed it) on your mobile. And there it is, a 40 minute call to his number. What could you have spoken about with no memory of it for 40 minutes?


“Oh God please don’t let there have been begging.”


It’s all too much.


But then one day you wake up and realise for the first time half way through a morning that you haven’t thought of that person yet today and you realise that you are no longer lying around in a miserable, dejected, gloomy, crestfallen heap with bad hair. You tread carefully in case it does a surprise sniper attack on you when you least expect it. And eventually even that doesn’t happen anymore.


Til you run into him at the pub with his new girl and you have just had the worst haircut of your life. Then it all falls apart again right there.

The revenge get back!