It turns out Sven looks nothing at all like Taylor Lautner.

Today I met my ex-partner's new lover in the apartment we shared until only three days ago. The meeting occurred by accident - at least partially. My new upstairs neighbor, "Perry," invited me for dinner, and I decided to swing by the old apartment to pick up a bottle (one of my bottles) of wine. While in the shower, I toyed with the idea of running into Sven. I knew he'd been sleeping over at the old apartment. Perhaps I'd knock at the door only to hear Ex and him scurrying, mid-orgasm, to get dressed. Perhaps I'd even allow myself to be amused by the sight of Ex opening the door, messy-haired, masquerading as though nothing carnal had been happening.

These thoughts didn't last long. By the time I finished my shower and glanced at the clock, I was almost certain that Ex and Sven wouldn't be home. It was 5:30 - they'd probably be out tango dancing or hustling (that is, dancing the hustle) or otherwise enjoying themselves in the city, completely oblivious to me.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I approached the door to the old apartment and heard a man's voice - not Ex's - chatting carelessly away. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, this time louder. I heard some scurrying (presumably unrelated to sex), then Ex opened the door. I asked for a bottle of white wine. He nodded enthusiastically - "Sure, of course!" - then disappeared. I waited. When Ex opened the door again and presented me with the bottle, I couldn't stomach the pretense. "I heard his voice," I said. "I might as well meet him since he's here."

Ex nodded cheerfully - which struck me as odd - then called, "Sven?"

Right on cue, Sven appeared at the end of the hallway. He must have been standing just a footstep or two out of view, waiting for me (perhaps at Ex's instructions) to leave. But now that the jig was up, he approached me, aggressively friendly, and shook my hand as though he were about to sell me a car. "Steve, good to meet you!," he said. He said something else - a few other things - then bid me farewell. "Stay warm. It's chilly out, huh?"

A friend of Ex's had confided in me that Sven bore little resemblance to the Adonis in the photographs I'd seen. "He's photogenic, that's all," she'd said, and she was right. The first thing I noticed was his hair. It flopped downwards and outwards from a single point at the top of his head like a thicker, darker, slightly more stylish riff on Andy Warhol's wig. Then I glanced at his features. No snub nose, no luscious lips like the ones I saw in my "Sven flashes." Instead, his features were small, almost Irish-looking. He was also shorter than I'd imagined - about my height. At six feet and some leftover inches, Ex cuts a tall, impressive figure. I'd expected someone at least as tall as him, someone who would dwarf me.

The Taylor Launter comparison may have died at first sight, but another quickly took its place. As I shook Sven's salesman's hand, I realized he bore a distinct resemblance to Ex's last boyfriend before me: short, chipper, small-featured, small-bodied - a sort of man-boy (albeit with premature wrinkles from too much sun exposure), an Archie comic book character inked in flesh and blood. Don't get me wrong - he's good-looking enough. But not nearly as good-looking as I'd expected; not nearly enough to lure one's boyfriend away simply by virtue of his appearance.

As I exited the building, my chest began to heat up - a sure sign of a looming panic attack. I took deep breathes, called my mom ("You'll never guess what just happened. I met him."), then ascended three flights of stairs to Perry's apartment and presented him with the bottle of wine.

Perry is a gay man in his 60s. He lives with his feeble, 15-year-old dog in an apartment with a layout exactly like mine but into which he's invested a small fortune on various "improvements." He hired a "house doctor" to re-tile his bathroom, install new moldings, and paint each room a different (and very tasteful) color. Next he plans to install a marble floor and brand new cabinetry in the kitchen. He is obsessed with eradicating all imperfections from his apartment. He especially dislikes unnecessary protrusions - bumps in walls, cable wires around doorways - and has advised me several times to consider purchasing new doors. "They're only 45 dollars. Put a nice French doorknob on there. It's cosmetic," he shrugged. "You do one thing at a time."

I've known Perry for only three days, but it's clear that he loves to remodel and spend small but efficacious sums of money. (Today he bought a new iron - "only 50 bucks!" - and presented me with a freshly-ironed shirt as evidence of its talents. He did the math for me as well - "four dollars a shirt at the cleaner's, I ironed 30 shirts today, so I'm already ahead.") It's also clear that he's incredibly lonely. He talks about friends, but many of them are dead. He lives on disability because of his HIV status (he tested positive five years ago). He has 11 brothers and sisters but none of them seem present in his life as anything other than anecdotes. He is the picture of my greatest fear - my "ghost of Christmas future," as a friend put it: that I will wake up at age 60, alone but for the company of a half-dead canine, and spend the day ironing all my shirts, then invite my new neighbor to join me for dinner because I have nothing else planned, for that night or most others.

I want to tell you more about Perry: his delicious, gourmet cooking; his resemblance to a handsomer T.S. Eliot; his love of Masterpiece Theatre and Dame Maggie Smith; his similarity to For Real in that both men can talk a blue streak without giving meaningful or grammatical closure to any one thought. But my heart just isn't in it. Ex has not contacted me about my letter. When I saw him today at the apartment and asked if he'd read it, he said he couldn't access the internet - I'd unplugged the modem and router amidst the frenzy of the move. I said he could access the internet on his phone; he nodded. But it's now almost 3:00 AM and not only haven't I heard from him, but he isn't picking up his cell phone or returning my calls. Part of me clings to the hope that he is breaking up with Sven. Perhaps he read my letter on their way back from the dance concert they were attending at the Joyce. Perhaps Ex was so overwhelmed by my public outpouring of affection that he called off his romance with Sven right there on the subway. At this very moment, Sven could be as heartbroken as I am, and the only reason Ex isn't answering my calls is because he's trying to offer Sven some kind of comfort.

The more likely scenario: Ex hasn't read the letter. The scenario I fear most: Ex read my letter, but it fell on deaf ears. I am John Cusack blasting my boombox to an empty house. Not Peter Gabriel's voice; not the stupid, endearing spectacle of romance; nothing can rekindle his feelings for me, not even the sacrifice of my last shred of dignity.

Tonight I want to die.

I do not believe I am strong enough to be alone; I suspect this belief is part of what sustained our 12 year relationship. I do not believe I will meet someone else or that I will ever want to. I am finally throwing the pity party to which I've been told I'm entitled. But even as I attempt to make a joke out of it, I can't. Not since my darkest stretch of depression several years ago have I believed so utterly in the impossibility of my continued existence.

I am writing for my life and losing. For the last 28 days the writing has helped, but tonight it feels wasted, useless.

I can't believe he would do this to me. I can't believe he's out enjoying a dance concert or sharing his bed (for the third night in a row) with another man while I can think of nothing, write about nothing, but him. I can't believe 12 years can amount to this. If this can happen between two people who loved each other, whose relationship outlasted many marriages, who supported each other through mental illness and crippling bouts of insecurity, who fought for each other's successes and nursed each other through failure, who hurt each other - by accident and on purpose - but who never stopped loving each other... If a relationship can gradually yet so suddenly crumble between two such people, I don't want to survive this. I can't - I refuse to - survive this.

I'm not going to kill myself tonight. I just took a third xanax; with any luck I will simply cry myself to sleep. Tomorrow I'll stay with my parents or visit my friends near work who promised me premium-grade marijuana and sympathetic shoulders to slobber on. A friend of mine from Canada just answered my emergency text. He reminded me that I'm grieving, that I'm entitled to grieve, but he said I have a good spirit and one day, when I'm ready, I will attract someone with whom I can share a permanent love. I hope he's right; it certainly felt good to hear. But for now the best I can hope for is simply to survive this night, then the next, on and on until the basic need to survive gradually gives way to something more positive and life-affirming.

To anyone who might be reading this, and to anyone who is suffering the same humiliation and hopelessness as me, let's refuse to survive in a world where love doesn't last. Let's choose to survive instead, if only from one night to the next, so that one day, once we're strong enough, we can begin to remake the world into exactly what we want it to be - a world where we are happy and loved, and where hopelessness is far, far behind us.