Alex, Cooper, and Peter were very painful break-ups. After Alex dumped me over the phone I had to swallow my pride and ask for help. Having a similar conversation with Cooper, but in a more stable situation myself, I felt the need to allow the pain to hurt. After that nasty fight over a piece of bacon, Peter had to go; and watching him leave with his belongings on a market kart just made me feel I had failed again.

There was this co-worker, back in 2012, a couple of months before I met Peter and had that sweet and deceiving first date, who witnessed from a close distance all of my failed attempts at love. She would see the pattern repeat itself: I would go out with a guy a couple of times, we would start dating, and shortly we'd fall apart. What intrigued her the most was seeing how ready I always was to jump back to the beginning.

'I know what I'm looking for' I told her. 'I know I will find a guy who just wants to be with me and I'll know I won't have to keep looking.'

'Yeah. But how do you just go all thank you, next with them?'

'I don't go thank you, next with them. I go with myself. I try and see if the guy is who I'm looking for. Sometimes it takes me a week to notice they're not. Some other times, like Cooper, it took me six months to see and six more to accept. In the end, they're not the one. So, like you said... Thank you, next.'

'Wow. I wish I were like that. On the surface I'm really strong, but every time it doesn't work, my world collapses. I wish you find what you're looking for. I wish we both do.'

Last time I checked on her social media, she didn't seem to have found. I hope she does one day, whatever it is.

It is a very fantastic situation indeed to find what you were looking for. And for a moment I thought I had.

But here I was again. Somehow, after so many things that happened and changed in the past two years, here I was. Alone in my bed. Living in my mother's house. Single and miserable.

It seemed that, as much as I tried to change my life, it kept throwing me back to square one. No matter how many things I did, people I met or even jobs I loathed, I always ended up in the same situation.

Some things, as often as they happen to you, never get any easier. Being left is one of them. Over and over I end up blaming myself and yet there's is nothing that prevents me from deeply trusting when people say they promise I'm too important for them to let me go, when in reality my days have always seemed like a window to a void.

I had an important meeting at work the day after Cooper broke-up a year-old relationship over the phone. People could see how indeed broken I was and they wanted to be nice friends, so I got lots of hugs and the same reassuring message again and again 'Shake it off! Better days will come!'

In hindsight, I was trapped. They meant well and in all their honesty they believed they were helping, but you can't just shake off a year of your life. You mustn't simply shake off all the dreams you built.

Cooper was eight years older than me, then twenty-two, and he was coming back to our town and had decided, for the first time in his life, to find a steady boyfriend. He said he didn't have the energy for fast-fuck and that he was looking for the real thing. We proceeded to Skype everyday for almost two months before his flight back home. All of our talks were about how our life would be together. We discussed all the important details, such as making sure we would never run out of Coke and Nutella and that we'd have a two-seat car so we could never offer anyone rides.

Those conversations kept happening throughout the first months of all relationship and I felt fulfilled for the very first time. As I have said before, there was no limits to my admiration for him. He showed me a life of culture and arts that I have never left behind nor I ever plan to.

It took me quite a while to understand how toxic the relationship was for me. For any given amount of time we would spend together, he made sure to spend at least the same without me. Whenever we made plans, he was the one to male them without caring much if I could afford tagging along. He influenced the movies I watched and the books I read. At the time, and for a harmful long time afterwards as well, I thought it all came from a place of love. It is clear now it all came from a place of not willing or even planning to enter my life.

For reasons I never cared about, his mother and sister lived with him. The sister was a fucking sweetheart. The mother truly worked her best to make justice to the bitch mother-in-law image. She saw me as a social leech. She basically saw herself in me.

She would go to ridiculous extents, such as never allowing me to wear his clothes. First, everyone knows gays only date to double their wardrobe! Second... There's no second, but the whole thing felt better.

There was this one occasion when he bought himself a new bed. His room was huge and he had an old single bed. He bought himself a brand new... single bed. Left out much, Ralph? You ain't seen nothing yet. Dumb and blind as I was, I was the one to disassemble the heavy old bed and put the new one in place. I was sweating like two rats fucking in a wool sock, so I took a shower afterwards. Now the funny part: he wouldn't lend me a dry shirt to wear. Mine was soaked. Apparently, that was my problem, not his. And definitely not his mother's.

But the worse indeed was yet to come. I started noticing he was becoming rather elusive and upon pressing him he admitted to have bought himself a still-building apartment. I was so happy for his milestone, but I soon started asking myself how I fit into all of that. I obviously didn't, and that was clear from the get-go. All our relationship was built around making plans for our future. What was left to talk now? Every single fucking time I tried to bring it up, I felt like a fucking intruder and he made sure to show me he felt the same.

You see? That's a lot of things to just shake them off like people were telling me to. So, when Peter left, I knew I had to allow the pain to run its course. And, when Oliver left, it felt as if I was made of nothing else other than pain.

Yes, it had been a difficult year and a half. Yes, we endured a lot. But we endured it together. The day after he left, the very first day I hadn't seen him since he first emerged from that subway station looking lazy... that day broke me more than anything before.

I didn't know how I found strength to leave the house and go to work every day, where people praised me on losing weight. I didn't know how I found strength to leave work and go home every night fully knowing he wouldn't be there to welcome me. I didn't know, above anything else, how I found the strength to sleep every night, knowing I wouldn't have his arm around me.

So many times during that year and a half I woke up startled and panicking after some nightmare where he had just unceremoniously left me just to find his warm hug. Now there I was, living that nightmare every single day of my life.

Shortly after that, maybe only ten days, my father gifted my mother and my grandmother a trip to the Northeast of the country, where they would celebrate some big birthday of my one of nanna’s sisters. I would still be working, so I couldn’t go. Since it was already December, mom decided they would stay there for Christmas, coming back just a few days short of the coming year.

Within only four months I had lost my partner, I had lost my health, I had lost my favourite celebration of the year. I have always been a lonely person, but it had never hurt as much.

The days passed, I was on unpaid vacations for the second year in a row and mom and nanna had come back from their trip when New Year’s Eve arrived. One year before Oliver and I got a puppy Zeph and went to his father’s house to celebrate. Now I had nothing. Of all the moments, opportunities, people, jobs, memories, changes, and chances I had lost in life, I had never felt more pained and struck by loss as I did then. My father had invited us all to spend the turning of the year at his place. It was nearby, but after so much loss, I clung to the only thing I felt I had left: a home, even if not the one I built, but still one. There was another thing I had also lost: my courage. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them my real reasons because I was certain my mother would belittle them.

I ended up using Zeph as an excuse. I just said I didn’t want to leave him behind on a night famous for being scary for dogs. I proposed we could do it at home instead. Let’s have dad come over, do everything here. They didn’t accept it.

The last thing my grandmother said to me before they left was ‘Happy New Year. Let’s hope in the new one you can love us as much as you love your dog’.

This is probably one of the few times ever you will see a person owing their life to their inability to keep quiet.

I was in so much pain. So much more than I ever thought I could feel. They had left me alone for Christmas and now they were leaving me alone again. My grandma, the most important person in my life, who raised me and was by me for every single step of my way. That same grandma left clearly heartbroken believing I didn’t love her.

It was just too much more than my strength; way more than I could ever take.

I felt my life was over. The only thing left was to officially end it.

I didn’t want to be a burden. I didn’t want them to come home and have to deal with a dead body.

I live in a rather dangerous part of my state, so it was an easy plan. Go up the slum, tease some bad guy, get a bullet through my head.

All along, two dear friends who were then dating tried their hardest over messages to stop me.

I felt like a burden to them as well. I was ruining what was supposed to be a night for celebrations.

I went to say goodbye to Zeph.

I held him tight like I always did and looked deep into his golden hazel eyes and he enjoyed my company just like he had always done.

I apologised for not being strong enough to keep my promise to be a good father to him as long as he lived.

So there it was, one more disappointment to add to the tab.

All along, two dear friends who were then dating tried their hardest over messages to stop me.

I told them I had said my goodbyes to Zeph.

They saw that as an opportunity.

They started saying things that were rooted deep inside my mind. How, unlike everything else, Zeph’s love for me hadn’t changed a bit. How I still had time and the chance to be faithful to him. I stared at their messages on my phone, trying their hardest to seem calm, and I looked at Zeph’s eyes. The same love since he first saw me was there intact.

There was apparently something I hadn’t lost.

But it was too much to take anymore.

I dropped my phone on the couch and collapsed on the floor.

I held my legs and cried myself to oblivion.