It’s funny how our significant others seem to have a way of kind of popping up again with­out us really expecting them. It also seems to happen a lot more with people you never had good closure with because you’re still thinking about them and those meetings aren’t really that coincidental. Especially now that most relationships are kind of ambiguous in form, this happens a lot more than we’d like. I’ve been with a pretty good amount of girlfriends and I found myself in this situation a lot and with most of them, it took a while for me to get some closure and each was kind of different. Maybe this will help some people out. I’m going to change some names so you all don’t creep on these people later, and I know some of you were going to try.

First there was Anna, my first true love at the age of 15. Boy, those were good times. Well, I had a good thing going with this girl, up until the point where I had to move to the other side of the country. This kind of caused some issues since we didn’t want to do the long dis­tance thing, because that sucks. But there was never really a breakup, so it wasn’t like we really wanted to end things. We kept in contact, always in the backs of each other’s minds, no matter who we were with. Fast-forward three years to when we finally see each other again. Talk about anti-climactic. I was surprised to see how much she had changed and that she wasn’t exactly the person I loved. It was weird. It kind of sucked. But at the same time, it helped me under­stand a little bit about myself and probably killed some idealism, but, hey, I got my closure.

Then there’s Sarah. We had a pretty major falling out because I slept with an ex, but more on that in a minute. Anyway, it was pretty bad. I was eventually told that because of me that she spent her first semester of college devoted to hating men and writing award winning slam poetry, which I’m kind of proud in a sick way. But see the spark wasn’t dead. I was stupid. I knew what I did was dumb and she had been one of my closest friends. So I tried to get her back. You know, platonically or whatever. After months of emails and creepy Facebook chats and emails, I finally got to see her in person over the summer; we talked until four in the morning and everything kind of turned out okay. Once again, closure.

Then there’s the ringer, Sally, the ultimate ex, the one I was talking about before. I could write a whole article about Sally, but no one would read that. No one cares about my prob­lems. I’ll spare you the details but I was very involved to the point where my life was revolving around her and I was crushed many a time. Basically what happened was, after two and a half years of issues, there came a moment when after our many “breaks” we had sex for one last time. Why was it the last? Because I felt dirty. This doesn’t happen very often, but I felt like I had done something that I couldn’t forgive myself for. My closure came from something I had done hundreds of times before, and it felt good to be done.

Now these girls are all just part of the past now, and probably for the better. It’s never really a constructive thing to have our past relationships lingering around in our minds, messing with the system. They ruin future or current things, and that just isn’t fair. You just kind of have to poke around till you find the things that make them disappear.