The White Board Incident

When I was a freshman in college I fell for my first girlfriend (we’ll call her Claire) hard. I knew that she flirted around with anything that had a pulse but I was wearing love-smeared glasses with blue frames and I couldn’t see very far beyond them. So after a few months of intense drama (my friend who happened to be Claire’s roommate acted as our go-between so there was a lot of she said/she said) and flirting, we were officially dating…for about a week. The weekend our brief relationship ended we were both drunk. Wait, let me rephrase that: she waited until she was drunk before she broke up with me. Apparently she needed liquid courage to do the deed. Not only did she wait to get drunk before breaking my heart, but immediately afterwards she went in search of her crush and asked her out! Already being in love with somebody else, the other chick said no, breaking Claire’s poor little heart. (I actually didn’t find that out until two years later from a friend of the other chick. Dra-ma.)

So anyway, to the white board incident. Seeing as my first gf broke my heart into microscopic pieces, I was angry. So angry in fact that the following year I still wasn’t over it. I was out partying with some friends when I ran into a former love interest of Claire’s, whom we will call David, who was an acquaintance of mine. I asked him what was up and he was like,

“I was just hanging out with Claire…”

“What were you two doing?” I queried.

“You’ll have to ask her that,” he replied.

What the shit kinda response is that?

“I will,” I said.

Naturally I assumed they’d been having sex (which was unlikely because he had a gf at the time) and my jealousy and memory of rejection were inflamed. I went marching up to her dorm room, with a concerned friend trailing behind trying to get me not to go, spitting obscenities about Claire. When I was within earshot of her open dorm window I yelled,

“Where is she? She’s probably fucking David.”

Of course, I knew this was not the case, having just seen him three minutes ago in the opposite direction.

I managed to get into her dorm and I was in the process of writing an angry, drunken message on the white board on her door, when I suddenly found myself on my back on the hall floor, white board in hand. When I realized I had fallen and torn the board off her door, I simultaneously noticed a pair of feet standing in her doorway. They were hers. She had heard my shitty remark and was now yelling at me. I don’t remember exactly what she said but I’m sure, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” was in there somewhere. Oh, I do remember asking her what she had been doing with David and she said it was none of my business...True enough, but my heart still hurt and I didn’t know how to heal it.

I took off running in embarrassment. I called the next morning to humbly apologize but I only got more yelling and not for another two years after that did we speak to each other as friends.

That’s the worst dating experience of my dating career.