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The time has come, my boyfriend said, to talk of breaking up…

Only he wasn’t my boyfriend. More like – my hook-up from afar. He called, told me he wanted to be with me, talked about himself for several hours at a time, and hung up the phone. An all-around satisfying relationship for one of us. Him. And then he ended it. I’m sure he was completely broken up about it.

Oh, wait, except he wasn’t. And how do I know that, might you ask? Well, you might, but that would be stupid. Because a relationship based completely on his feelings and what he had to say on his schedule was bound to be…forgettable. To him, not to me.

I was invested because I knew everything a person could know from 2000 miles away. Except that he was dating my friends. That I didn’t know until later.

But what I did know was him…I could predict his feelings, his reactions, his thoughts. He was a book I could read before I opened the cover. Well, we’d opened the covers, but that doesn’t much matter now.

Aside from him being predictable, which, on paper, seems more boring than a sign of our closeness, I knew his family; his story. I made him laugh. He made me laugh. Well, actually, I made myself laugh. But what are details when it’s over either way?

So, one night, like any other, I waited by the phone, and he texted me that it was over. I really, really hate text messaging. And by text messaging, I mean men.

Then he said he’d call me later and never did. Then he invited my friend over, got her drunk and…well, the rest I don’t know. I wasn’t there. And last night, he took his ex-girlfriend out, the one who broke his heart, the one right before me and right after me – my former best friend, the one he left me for the first time – and that is all he wrote.

And I would like to know, what the hell am I supposed to do? One part of me would really like to cut off his balls. The other part would like to tell every woman in the world just how small he really is. (So I thought I’d start with this newspaper and work my way up. Something he was never very good at.) Or, even better, I’d like to talk to him and tell him how much I still love him and want to be with him. And then I’d like to kiss him. Ok, so that’s not better. That’s actually a lot worse. But that’s what I’d really like to do.

And I’d like him to tell me he loves me too.

Or come up with an explanation. A reason. Anything would help. A lie would do.

But I finally got me an honest guy. Who would’ve thought? So now to my hysterical enjoyment, he tells me the truth: with his silence he implies what three hour conversations every night could never say. He does not, and never did, want me.

Fuck. Me. Oh, wait, he already did! And that’s all it was to him. My all-time favorite quote from his two-faced lips: “I don’t think we even had sex, really. I didn’t cum.”

Except he did. Morning after pill, anyone?

This is the man I’m losing sleep over. The man I can’t forget.

Right now, as I’m writing this, he is out with my former best friend, having, and I quote, “a great night.” If this article is any indication, my night is registering about a 1 on the Richter scale of great nights; about par with my Richter scale of orgasms.

I feel like I need to have some sort of point here, some sort of direction in which I am heading. Where I am heading, though, honestly, is into some sort of personal hell in which Ben and Jerry have spent many a night with me. They are the only men allowed.

All I know is that I hate this part of relationships; the part where you have to figure out what “present” and “future” you created and what was really there. At the same time, you have to try to be the bigger person and, perhaps, not call the cops and tell them he is driving on a permit even though he is twenty-one like you really want to. And you have to try really hard not to call his mom and tell her to check his sock drawer for the non-existent box of condoms because he doesn’t have safe sex and yes, he still lives at home.

And while I am sitting here doing this and whomever else is in this position is sitting here doing this and remembering all the good times which were really just bad times that you fantasized into good times, you have to get over the fact that he not only moved on, but he moved on before he broke up with you. AKA – he cheated. Which is always a keeper. Ok, you can’t cheat if you’re not in a relationship. Bullshit. I call it cheating. It feels like cheating. He told me I was cheating when I danced with a drunken creep with a hard-on against my will at a concert, so I think taking his ex out on a date officially counts. Which means: FUCK YOU! Or something to that extent.

Ok, trying to be the bigger person starts now, I guess. It somewhat helps that I was the bigger person to start with in that relationship. Six foot? Hmmm. I don’t know what he was referring to, but no matter what it was, he was off in his measurements.

Since it’s only been a few days, I feel like I have a grace period to be stronger. Because I feel like I took a baseball bat to the stomach from a hick with a penchant for claiming he respects women.

Hey, I got a joke for him…You know you’re a redneck when you make a beer funnel out of a Rockies baseball helmet to give it to your sister as a present for all of her girlfriends you stole. But you keep it and use it to get her newest girl for yourself.

Or maybe he had a joke for me. Maybe the joke was calling me and telling me he missed me. That he’d always wanted to be with me. Couldn’t stop thinking about me. That we had a future.

What we really had was a past. A past neither of us should have repeated. But now that we have, how come I’m the only one that can’t get up in the morning?

Why am I the only one swallowing…my pride?

I really, really hate text messaging. And by text messaging, I mean men.