by Jason_Nellis.

A warning to men everywhere: Don’t be stupid. I’ll be the first to admit, I am not, nor can I ever be, the perfect date or boyfriend. In fact, sometimes, I’ve been downright moronic. Chalk it up to being male (a commonly-blamed attribute), young (though this tends to shift—the older I get, the younger I claim to be), or impetuous (or, really, more like ADD, because—hey, look, a kitty cat!). Whatever the case may be, I’m not without faults. Most of the time, I end up getting myself into heaps of trouble by ignoring them rather than admitting to them.

Let me explain:

At the beginning of my junior year of college, I met a girl named Deanna. She was a freshman straight out of the South, twang and all. She was only four foot eleven, so I towered about a foot over her, but I found that more endearing than funny. She also called me on whatever BS I happened to be spewing (usually when I made outrageous claims to get attention, like “I invented the stapler.” I’m like that sometimes).

She was very cute, and I was very interested. So, of course, I made a move.

I was very smooth, of course. We’d just watched a movie in her dorm’s common room, and everyone else had left. I said something smooth, like “that was a great movie,” and she responded “yeah,” and then we started making out.

Like I said, smooth.

We started seeing each other fairly regularly after that. We’d watch football games together, have dinner, go to the movies. You know, normal dating stuff. She even met my mom, when she came to visit. It felt like the beginning of a good, solid relationship.

Except, of course, that after two months, I got bored. This isn’t uncommon, I suppose. Once you get into a rhythm, it’s tough not to feel things get a bit stale. So, I did what any normal guy would do to remedy the situation.

I ignored the problem. Literally.

One day, I just stopped calling her, ignored my phone, didn’t read my email. I took an exit off the freeway that was our relationship and didn’t even bother to tell her.

Okay, okay. It was a really, REALLY dumb move. I really was young and stupid, and somehow thought that this was a nicer, less painful way to break up with a girl. I have been informed by MANY of my friends since then that this was a bad choice. In retrospect, I tend to agree.

However, the time came when I finally manned-up and confronted her.

Two weeks later. Yikes.

I dropped by her dorm room unannounced one night, and the conversation went something like this:

“Hey, Deanna, how have you been?”

”WHY HAVEN’T YOU CALLED ME?!”

“Uh, I’m sorry, can we talk for a minute?”

“YOU HAVEN’T ANSWERED MY QUESTION!”

(Okay. Clearly, this was going to go well.)

I came up with every lame, sorry, tired excuse I could think of.

“I feel terrible, I’m so sorry.”

“It was wrong of me not to call, I’ve been so messed up lately.”

“It’s not your fault, it’s mine.”

(By the way, girls really hate it when you use any variation of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Again, something I had to learn the hard way.)

Of course, the best part was yet to come. Before dropping by her dorm, I’d been by a friend’s house to pick up a book I needed. A large, thick text on the development of the South Side of Chicago as it pertained to gentrification. (You know, a real grabber.) The thing was probably five hundred pages thick, hard cover. You could use it to weight a stack of papers during a tornado.

As I was explaining how bad of a human being I was, I tried to make light of the situation.

“I’ll understand if you think I’m a bad person. That’s fair. If you need time, if you don’t want to talk, I completely understand,” I said.

“Heck,” I chuckled, “if you want to throw this book at me, that’d be okay too.”

(Disclaimer: unless you are a brilliant, witty person who can change the mood in a room instantaneously, joking during a bad breakup is a STUPID MOVE.)

Whoops.

Without missing a beat, she grabbed the book, and with both hands, chucked it straight at my face. It slammed into me like an anvil. My vision was blurred, my balance was shot, and my cheek was bruised. I’m fairly sure that I had a near death experience, because I swear, I saw dead family members pointing and laughing at me. Which, whether I’m going up or down when I die, is not what I want to see.

“Okay,” I said, my eyes tearing up from pain, “I brought that one on myself.”

I left immediately after that, embarrassed that not only had I been a jerk, but that I’d literally just had the book thrown at me.

I deserved exactly what I’d gotten. Not only was it not okay for me to ignore her like that, but I’d been ignoring the real problem, which was that, given the choice to do the right thing or do the easy thing, I’d chosen the easy thing. Captain Obvious here should have known better.

Still, in the end, things worked out. A few months later, we reconnected, I apologized, and we ended up becoming friendly. She even apologized for chucking my textbook at my head, which she didn’t have to do.

So the end of the story? The overall moral to this fiasco of a relationship?

Don’t bring heavy objects when you break up with a girl. Probably not a good call.

About the author: Jason has lived in Washington DC, Chicago, and now resides in Los Angeles, where he’s trying to make enough money to eat. A graduate of Northwestern University’s Theatre program, he hopes to find work in the entertainment industry, while at the same time looking for that special girl–or, at least, one who won’t injury him, no matter what he says or does. When not writing, Jason is an actor, director, and producer, having performed in or worked on such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, The Time of Your Life, The Last Five Years, Side Man, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Jason’s personal blog can be found Here.