So she was seeing another guy and ringing to break up with me on his phone which probably meant that he was right next to her. I shouldn’t be hurt by this, should I? How was I to react to all this? I calmly said goodbye and hung up the phone. The world crashed around me... cars and people all seemed to roar past me all of a sudden. My senses were alive and kicking. What was this feeling?

I was mad. Of course, I was. There was no other way about it. Coming around the bend at exhilarating speed to join anger was sadness. The two of them, battling it out, were trying to surpass the other on the final bend when suddenly, oh dear, it seems anger and sadness have collided with each other and became a gigantic mess of burning rubber and metal as they fireball through the finish line. It was a tie, folks...

Strangely, I felt nothing on the surface. I carried on working as normal on my desk, interacted with colleagues as I had done... no change it seemed. Tomorrow I was to clear my head by taking a four hour walk through London. I’m glad she chose to call me on a Friday. It was the calm before the storm, it would appear. Three days after, the world came crashing around again, this time on the surface. After holding and maintaining what could have been said to be an acceptable appearance during work, I cried hard when I got back to my accommodation. Tears appeared and subsided as they wanted. I didn’t cry like this since the night I reminisced about my grandfathers and how I felt that I had not made the most of my time with them when they were alive.

I called her. I wanted to hear her voice. She sounded happy, not happy to hear from me, but just generally in a happy mood. We talked about our relationship and she told me she was sorry that it had to end this way, but the guy... the other guy... he had a long history with her. The other guy was what could be called her first love. He was in the same school as her during GCSEs and although they were unofficially going out, because of the pressures of study and getting the important grades needed to be admitted into the top schools of the country through coercion by her parents and teachers she forced herself to break up with him. I knew a lot about this guy, even seen his pictures, because before we were going out and even after we were going out, she mentioned him a lot, almost religiously. Sometimes she would talk about him and compare him to me when I had a fight with her. To her, he was the right guy at the wrong time. Her ex was the wrong guy at the right time. As for me... I don’t think I was the right guy or at the right time...

This other guy was her dream. This was the dream she was chasing... waiting for the right moment to be reunited with him. Could it be finally the right time for her? I never did pay too much attention to this other guy during our relationship. For me, he was irrelevant and an unrealistic threat. Name? Labelled unimportant... deleted... trashed... gone. How wrong I was... this threat was very real. This guy lived in the same city as her and even though they hadn’t talked to each other for more an a year or so... meeting up with each other during the summer would and was a devastating proposition for me. This guy’s name has been firmly ingrained into my head to say the least...

Yet I was still holding on... hoping that she would realize her mistake... she would come back to me. Again, a fool I was, I was the mistake and she had already gone back to him...