Cleared for Landing.

When I flew back to Louisiana, I had just as much trouble as I did getting to Indiana. My luggage was lost, again. And I could tell something was very off with Adam. I hadn’t talked to him all day, and even when I called him to tell him I made it home safely, he didn’t answer.

My flight into Baton Rouge came in late. So late, in fact, that nothing was open in the airport. No coffee shops, no restaurants, not even any attendants at the airline desks. I was waiting for my luggage to arrive, along with the people from my flight, and someone who looked familiar—Austin.

He worked with me at A&F. I hadn’t talked to him much at all. I knew people thought he was an asshole, and because I didn’t know any better, I assumed he was. For that idea alone, I wanted to avoid him. But there was all but twenty of us waiting in the baggage claim. And when he made eye contact with me, I knew there was no way out.

He asked me how I was and told me he went on a trip for his landscape architecture class. I told him I went to visit my boyfriend. He got his luggage shortly after, I told him I’d see him at work, and I stood, waiting for my bags {which never came}.

When I saw him at work a few days later, we folded shirts together. I was already in a shitty mood because of the way Adam was acting. But I tried to blame my frustration on the missing luggage.

Adam and I went for a few weeks hardly talking. I knew something was wrong, but Adam was ignoring me every chance he could. My heart was broken. I’d never had anything like this happen to me and it sucked—bad. Toward the end of October, my friends and family told me what was up—Adam was trying to wriggle free of our relationship without properly dumping me.

I was in school, writing a regular relationship column, working on a sex radio show, and my own relationship was crumbling. I tried my best to keep moving, live my life as best I could, and write a weekly column that wouldn’t reflect my current heartbreak. One of those columns included a topic of pickup lines.

Adam didn’t like that one bit. He took his anger out on me, using it as a chance to pick a fight via text message. But I didn’t respond.

I told myself I would try to go an entire week without talking to him, an attempt at giving him a taste of his own medicine. I wanted him to feel like an asshole for treating me the way he did. I wanted him to feel the pain I did when I looked at my phone and had no missed calls from him. I wanted him to be lonely.

I went the entire week without talking to him, but once the week was over, I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, because I figured he would cave and call me. I was completely wrong.

Everyone was telling me to move on, but it wasn’t easy. I had such a history with Adam that made it seem impossible to just write him off. But I also knew Adam and I were reaching a point of no return. I loved him, but I couldn’t accept the way he was treating me. I missed him and wanted to talk to him, but he was pushing me far away.

In the next week, Adam and I talked some, but the talking turned into fighting. He told me he didn’t have an interest in my life anymore and was tired of being fake with me.

The holidays were approaching and my original plans were to have Adam fly to Louisiana and drive me back home to Indiana. I needed answers, so Sheena talked to Adam for me. He acted like everything was cool and that he was still going to drive me home. But he also told her he knew I was more committed to the relationship than he was, which hurt me.

It hurt me to the point of doing something drastic—I changed my Facebook profile to say “single.”

Although I was still very hurt, my attitude was starting to shift. The bigger picture depicted an Adam that I wasn’t in love with—he was dependent on his family, who didn’t like me. I decided to present Adam with an ultimatum: call me by Sunday, or I’ll assume it’s over.

He never responded.

And that was how I got dumped by my first love, my best friend. Of course, after I got rid of my physical baggage from my relationship with Adam, it took months before he was out of my mind. At the time, sorting through my emotions was one of the most difficult things I had to go through. But looking back on it now, it was just one step in many to come of my dating life.