Eight-and-a-half years ago tonight (not at all true but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of eight-and-a-half years) I drove home from my ex-girlfriend’s house listening to Jimmy Eat World on full blast and crying moments after she dumped me. There was a lump in my chest that has still yet to be completely relinquished from my incessantly shrinking hairy chest. I would spend the next decade losing faith in humanity, garnering a powerful case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, gaining a whole lot of weight, and almost failing out of college.

After breaking up with a wonderful girl last weekend, I laid in bed with the same feeling in my chest. That sinking feeling that cannot be quenched by simple human desires like food, sleep, or sex. This time, though, I was the one who initiated the end of the relationship. I wanted so badly to tell her things like ‘I still want to be really good friends with you’ but how much of a douche would I have been if I had said that? First, anyone on the receiving end of that sentence practically knows that it’s bull. There’s no second, that was the only thing really. If I had said that, I would have been just another guy who dumped her and then insulted her by saying he wanted to be friends. Today at work, some friends also reminded me that even though I still want to be friends, she may not because I may have just broken her heart. I naively think that everybody in the world would just love to be friends with me no matter what I do or say to them. So yeah, now there are two reasons I shouldn’t, and didn’t, bring up the fact that I still wanted to be friends.

However, I still have that sinking feeling in my chest. I feel so bad for her (of course, this is assuming that she liked me). I want to reach out and tell her that I’m here, but also know that that may give her some sense of false hope. Man, guys are just the worst.

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