I haven't felt compelled to write about my breakup since Friday, which I think is a good sign.

On Saturday I returned to my apartment, smoked a little pot, did some dusting (my new apartment, perfectly priced and proportioned as it is for my new life, tends to accumulate quite a bit of dust), caught up on TiVo'ed episodes of Modern Family and The Soup, then ended the night with only one episode of Golden Girls (Episode 66, "Dorothy's New Friend," in which Dorothy befriends a snooty Miami novelist only to discover her new friend is an anti-Semite). On Sunday I talked on the phone with a friend and my parents, penciled my social activities for the week into my appointment book, prepped for Monday classes, and watched a movie (Fair Game - the 2010 biopic with Naomi Watts, not to be confused with the 1995 "legal thriller" starring then-supermodel Cindy Crawford). From Monday onwards I threw myself into teaching. True to my word, I have not seen or spoken to Ex since he drove me home from the hospital - despite the fact that we teach at the same college and live only a block apart.

I still haven't fully accepted the breakup. The curtain may have fallen on the theatrics - the sobbing, the shoving, the groveling, the twists (Sven) and turns (the psych ward) - but I'm certain I have several acts left to play in the continuing saga of my separation from Ex and reunion with myself. Will Steve break down once more into a sniveling pile of self-pity? Will he live happily on his own, find a new boyfriend? The answer to these questions and so many others is, simply, "yes." Will I backslide? Yes. Do I foresee great joy and tenderness in my future? Yes. Will I experience great sadness again? Yes. Will I die one day? Yes. Would I prefer certain of these things to happen and others not? Yes. But the future is a paradox - absolutely certain on the one hand and completely unknowable on the other. It would be foolish to say "no," to sternly shake one's head in the presence of such vastness. One might as well insist on being blown upright through life. The physics of the universe simply make it impossible.

And so, like Joyce's Molly Bloom, I say "yes." To all the "yes/no" questions that frame the future, I consent. And to the less straightforward question of what will happen when Ex and I meet again, or even when our next meeting will take place, I say... I have no idea. I still love him. I'm confident he will remain in my life, be it as a friend or something else. At the same time, I'm comfortable postponing his presence in my future, at least until I can learn accept his answers, his "yeses."

I see him now, addressing me from an inky, imaginary darkness. "Yes," he says...

Yes, I want new experiences. Yes, I felt safe with you, but I can't love you the way you want to be loved, the way I know I should love my partner in the ever-expanding paradox of my own future. Yes, I hurt you. Yes, I spared you no cruelty or kindness. Yes, we shared such trust that I allowed myself to become as fragile, as hopeful, as naked in your presence as I've ever been in this world. Yes, I will share myself as nakedly with other men. Yes, I will sometimes think of you and sometimes forget you as I reveal myself to others. Yes, you will always be in my thoughts, yet I won't think of you nearly as often as I used to. Yes, I love you. Yes, I'm letting you go...

If this were a book, I'd conclude the first section here. If I were to adapt these first 47 days into a performance (as I'm thinking of doing), I'd insert a stage direction for the actor playing me: He opens his arms, pointing his chest to the ceiling of the theatre, and spins. Like Stevie Nicks - or Claudia Shear - he spins joyously and dizzily with release.

But this is someone else's ending - not mine.

My ending, like the future, is a paradox. I will continue writing. The release I feel right now may not last. I may need to continue kvetching, recalibrating my catastrophe scale, speculating on Ex's motives and negotiating my feelings for him daily, hourly, until the need to negotiate pulls at me less and less. But this feels like an ending, even as it doesn't. I can end a play as easily I can begin one - it's the stuff in between that's the most troublesome - but I can't put a period to this and imagine what comes next merely as the remainder of a half-empty page. What comes next will be text - always more text.

Stage direction:

I turn to the phantom Ex - the Ex who is merely my idea of the man I loved, the man I never completely knew, not even after 12 years. I turn to him and say, "Yes, I love you. Yes, I'm beginning to let you go. I miss you..."

Ex disappears into the darkness, as do the various figures that populated this first section of my narrative - my sister, my father, my many friends with fictionalized names. For the first time, it's only me on stage.

I'm frightened. I'm grateful.