My boyfriend dumped me on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday because he thought he wouldn’t be able to fake smile to the photos that night knowing he didn’t love me anymore.

            I wasn’t really mad he broke up with me, I was mad for two other reasons. First, who the fuck gives bad news in the morning? There’s an entire day ahead to be ruined! Second, there was no great story to it, something to make me feel special and eventually shock people when they heard the specifics. My brother’s boyfriend Carey has recently broken up with him because he had decided to join a weird cult that forbids you to love and hate. Ian broke up with me because he didn’t love me anymore. So have Johns and Jacks and Marys and every other Ian in the world.

             Actually, now that I think about it, our whole relationship lacked originality. We met through a mutual friend, went on a dinner-and-a-movie date and moved in together right after uni was over and we had to leave our dorms.

             And now that I think about thinking about it, I remember long drunken talks with my friend Bessie about how boring things were with Ian and how I thought fun-looking happy couples were a fraud.

             That’s the most stupid part of not being happy, whatever that is related to: you pretend not to believe other people’s happiness. However, while most people die without having this moment of realisation, I can proudly admit I was talking shit and I’m much, much happier now.

             But all this grown-up position didn’t take form right after Ian dumped me. People are only that mature in novels and I’m very real. First thing I did was yelling for him to get out of my house – only it wasn’t my house, I was the one who moved out in the end, but at that moment the only thing I wasn’t claiming to be mine was Ian’s dick, which brings me to my second action. I allowed myself an entire hour of total assurance there was another girl, for nobody in their sane conscience would stop loving me. I even spent a minute or two picturing a boy-lover and Ian’s sudden discovery he was gay.

             Back to current thoughts, that’s the most ridiculous thing to do. Nothing can be so humiliating than trying to save yourself from humiliation by making up a third person in a failed relationship. It’s actually the only thing to praise the bastard for, ending things without having used you as a backup plan while someone else came up.

             But again, real person here. So that’s how my first hour back to being a single woman was spent. Then there came alcohol, and I got a little crazy.

             I walked to the supermarket and tried to buy a bottle of scotch, but my credit card didn’t work. When I remembered that weeks later I thought how great it would be if there was such a thing as a post-break-up blocking service offered by credit card companies. Mine just happened to be a crappy company though, that’s why the thing didn’t work. And again, my crappy credit card company would never offer a post-break-up blocking service if there was one. I’m not even given online access to my account and it’s 2015, people! But anyway, my credit card didn’t work and all the cash I had was in a coin purse. So I bought the cheapest wine I have ever purchased in my life, including uni years.

             “Mean Girls” was on when I came back and in those ninety minutes I successfully emptied my cheap wine bottle, which, by the way, was made of plastic. How did I find out? Trying to smash it against the wall in an angry outburst. It made me laugh, hysterically. I was trying to make out how to bring Ian to the middle of the street so he could be hit by a school bus just like Regina George when my phone buzzed and the most bizarre thing happened.

             I STARTED SPEAKING ONLY MEAN GIRLS QUOTES. Some spontaneous things have happened to me in the past, like deciding not to have lunch and eating a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s instead. Or going topless on a beach in Barcelona. Or hitchhiking my way home right after I had moved in with Ian and got the wrong bus. But nothing could have prepared me for that split second when I slid my mobile’s screen to the green side and said “Jambo!”.

             It was Bessie. She happy-birthdayed me and asked me what time she was supposed to be in the pub, as my brother Charlie hadn’t been able to answer her properly. “He’s almost too gay to function”, was my response.

            “Haha. So around eight?”

            “That’s so fetch!”

            “Are those Mean Girls quotes? Aren’t we a little twenty-five-years-old old for this?”

            “Boo, you whore.”

            I hung up. But the quoting continued. Later in the pub I lied to my hometown friend Jordan who was interested in my work friend Lily about her having asked me how to spell orange, just for the sake of the game only I was playing. And when Donna asked me about Reed, who had been my boyfriend for a laughable week when we were both teenagers, I told her “ex-boyfriends are off-limits to friends. That’s just, like, the rules of feminism”. Reed later asked me about Donna and I told him her hair was big because it was full of secrets.

            That was not all. I told a friend she smelled like a baby prostitute and asked another why she was white. I tried to guess the weather by pressing my boobs and screamed I couldn’t help I was so popular. Every time the bartender gave me another pint I said “you go, Glen Coco”! Had it been Wednesday, I would have worn pink, I’m deadly sure. My high point of the evening was yelling “she doesn’t even go here” in reference to a girl one of my friends had brought along.

            The night was a disaster and I somehow managed to avoid all the questions about Ian. Of course, I had tons of fun and laughed like my life was a Saturday Night Live sketch, but you know that kind of fun. It’s that empty drunken fun you translate into shame the moment you wake up with your head spinning and the previous night comes back to mind. But I didn’t wake up alone.

            No, there wasn’t an unknown man (or woman) in my bed and that was definitely my own bed. But Bessie and Charlie had slept over. They had sorted out the whole Ian mess and wanted to make sure I was okay when I got up.

            There are two kinds of friends in life. There are friends, and there are friends <3 <3. Because I had Bessie and Charlie in my life, my two main friends <3 <3, I didn’t care about my drunken speech to my other friends the night before. Bessie and Charlie were the ones who would stick with me through thick and thin. Charlie had been my emergence contact ever since I left home, not Ian. Bessie was the only one who saw me when I had an allergic reaction to peanuts and my bottom lip was the size of my face and I couldn’t speak the consonants.

            It’s my twenty-sixth birthday today. There is a guy, thought there wasn’t one for a long time and it didn’t kill me. There’s a pub celebration, though most guests from last year didn’t RSVP. There are new friends from my new job which I newly love. And there are my girl Bessie and my baby brother Charlie to hug me tight as soon as they see me.

            So many good things have happened in a year I can’t even remember how that heart pain sensation from a year ago felt like.

            So if there was one thing I could tell the world was “don’t have sex, ‘cause you will get pregnant and die. Don’t have sex in the missionary position, don’t have sex standing up… just don’t do it, promise? OK, everyone take some rubbers.”