Last night my therapist and I talked about endings. Melanie concluded our previous session by asking me to consider whether I would take Ex back should he realize he made a mistake. Last night I answered that question honestly and painfully: no. Would I want him back? Yes. But like a recovering smoker tempted by the delicious fumes of somebody else's cigarette, I would know the relationship was no good for me. Loving Ex is a habit. Unlike smoking, it served me well for a number of years. It brought me joy and pleasure; it taught me intimacy, empathy; it delivered some of the most gut-punching shocks and liveliest surprises of my life. But sometime around year 10, I began loving simply for the sake of it. When I first started smoking, I did it half for the head rush and half for the conversations I would have with friends while we subversively shared a cigarette. But these benefits quickly burned away like so much rolling paper, leaving only the chemical need and the ritual that feeds it. Such can also be the case with relationships, only it takes months, years, even decades before the lover realizes he is no longer getting a head rush or good conversation, merely mouthfuls of smoke.

No, I would not take Ex back. At best, I would want him to see a therapist, do some work on himself, then call me if he still wanted a relationship - a new relationship, built on new terms - after he'd worked through our breakup as I'm trying to work through it now....

But all of this is predicated on Ex actually asking me to take him back - something he hasn't done and isn't likely to do. And if he isn't likely to ask me, how will I ever get the chance to assert myself, to write my own ending to our relationship? I've already attempted to write that ending, but the fact is, I'm still grasping for closure. When people ask why Ex broke up with me, I still say, "I don't know."

Melanie repeated something I'd acknowledged myself during our first session: I would probably never know why he made this decision. To this she added, "And even if you did know, is there really anything he could say to make you okay with this?"

I was silent for a moment. "Yes," I said, picking up steam as I continued. "Yes. He could say, 'A while ago I realized I was falling out of love with you. I was scared. I thought about it constantly. I started seeing a therapist, talking about my feelings. I honestly don't know what happened. But I tried everything, I tried falling in love with you again. I talked about my patterns and fears with my therapist; I know for a fact that none of them are what's motivating this."

Melanie raised an eyebrow. "Does that sound like [Ex]?"

It sounded like me, not Ex. Apparently the only person who can break up with me properly is me.

Back at home, I thought about endings. I thought about how ridiculous I was to expect Ex to break up with me in my voice, not his. At the same time, I thought about something Melanie said near the end of our session. "You know him better than most people. You may never know exactly what was going on in his head, but you can guess, and chances are whatever you think will have some truth to it." I've made several guesses already, testing them out in conversation as well as in this blog. Mostly they involve Ex running away from me, specifically from the version of him I reflect back to him. He wants to be perfect; I know his flaws. He aspires to remain forever in his 20s; I know his real age. He wants a full head of hair; I acted as his personal Photoshop artist to ensure he had one, at least in photographs. He wants to be worshiped; I know him for all his ungodly humanity.

Ex spent most of his teenage life vying for love from his adoptive mother, competing for it with his biological brothers, foster siblings, and his adoptive mother's biological daughter. The daughter always won; Ex felt loved, but never in first place. He came to see himself as the archetypal, Hans Christian Andersenian orphan - innocent of heart, gentle of spirit, capable of immense love but doomed to freeze to death alone. The fear of freezing made him work harder than most of us to maintain the love he had. He put up with abusive boyfriends. He put out for almost anyone. He underwent a self-conscious transformation from ugly duckling - big-eared and ungainly - to a swan, a dancer, perfectly proportioned and composed, complete with a plastic surgeon's pinning of his ears. Like Henrik Ibsen's Nora in A Doll House, he learned to do tricks, to delight, to amuse, to seduce, to dance the Tarantella. He danced furiously and indefatigably, only to loose one parter after another, one love-competition after the next, then drop to the floor in abject exhaustion.

It was in this state that I first got to know him. His boyfriend of nine months - my friend - had dumped him, and Ex simply couldn't understand it. Why did this keep happening to him? One boyfriend after another, always at the nine-month mark? He was heartbroken, depleted, facing the terrifying prospect of cold, icy streets. His recovery was slow and ragged. He burst into tears in the middle of class. He gave his ex-boyfriend a blowjob during a party, then proceeded to engage him in a slapping match in the middle of the dance floor.

Ex and I had already begun dating by this point, so I was less than thrilled about the blowjob and the gay-fight. He hadn't agreed to be exclusive - I'm not even sure he considered me his boyfriend yet - but I counted the blowjob as his second infidelity. The first occurred a few weeks before at a party for an out-of-town guest, during which he slipped away with the man of honor for some heavy-petting. Given that Ex was on the rebound, it really wasn't fair of me to hold either of these episodes against him. But hold them against him I did. I was 19 years old. I had never been in a relationship and I wanted one. Specifically, I wanted one with him. I was attracted to him; we'd had sex. As far as I was concerned, this meant I was entitled to fidelity. It also meant that Ex had deliberately violated my trust, and for this he deserved to be punished.

What followed was three months of brutalizing tug-of-war. On the one side, I held firm to my belief that Ex should be entirely mine, letting go of my end of the rope only when it suited me - that is, only when I wanted to see him knocked over by the sudden give. On the other side, Ex pulled for his freedom, but gradually his feelings started to change. He began to like me. Later he would tell me he was drawn to my intelligence and ambition as a writer, that he'd never dated anyone like me before and found himself suddenly drawn to the unknown. From that point on, he simply held onto his end of the rope for dear life. It was the only thing that held us together, and every time I let go, subjecting him to a bruising fall, he got back up, dusted himself off, and did his best to reason with me before I grabbed my end of the rope and started pulling again. I was pulling to keep us together, even as I was doing everything I could to humiliate him and drive us apart.

I'm not sure what happened next. Ex may have finally dropped the rope, refusing to endure the pulling match any longer. I, too, may have dropped the rope, frustrated and tired. Whatever happened, we finally began to connect as lovers at the beginning of a relationship are supposed to connect - playfully, stupidly, romantically. It was Valentine's Day; that may have helped. We were spending the weekend at my parents' house while they were visiting family in Florida. I treated Ex to diner at my favorite Japanese restaurant. To mark the day of love, the staff had placed a pink origami valentine on each table. Ex pocketed the valentine and brought it back with him to school, tucking it into a memory box where it likely remains to this day, a 12-year-old symbol of our new beginning.

I'd never heard the term "memory box" before I met Ex, though it turned out I had one. I simply called it a box, a storage place for old birthday cards, letters, a miscellaneous trinket or two - loose items with sentimental value. For a long time I kept these items in a shoe box. Later, as I accumulated more of them, I traded the shoe box for two fabric-lined, baby-blue storage containers from West Elm. Ex's memories demanded far more space. He has two tins of them - red and orange Lazzaroni Amaretti tins that I gave him, one 16 ounces and the other 14. He also has two large plastic bins of letters, photographs, journals, and memorabilia - one dedicated entirely to his six-months' study abroad in Taiwan, the other to fragments of his pre- and post-adoption past.

For Ex, these boxes contain far more than loose items from lost times. They are the repositories of a lost home and family, full of precious and dangerous clues to his identity. Ex remembers little about his biological parents and childhood home. He may have been abused by his father, or he may not have. His feet are badly burned. As a child, he was lowered into a bath of boiling water. Who had done this to him? His father? Worse - his mother? The mother who he recalls so lovingly, who he has all but canonized in his memory? The boxes are fortune-tellers, all-knowing but never all-telling. They promise as many answers as Ex has questions, yet they withhold as much as they reveal, speaking in cryptic, half-lost poems.

The contents of my boxes are far more mundane. I was reminded of this last night when, after I returned home from my session, I decided to raid them. I told myself I was researching the beginnings of my relationship so I could author the ending I needed, an ending based not only on my own hunches but on whatever truths I could extrapolate from Ex's own words in the letters and cards I'd saved. This is what I told myself I was doing; in reality, I was trolling for a written declaration of love, a promise of forever, that I could photocopy and leave in Ex's mailbox at work to remind him how deeply he betrayed me. I was sure I'd find something. I'd been with him for over a decade. I must have amassed at least a hundred letters, love-notes, Hallmark cards, and random, "I Love You!" Post-its.

Ex and I: The Archive. Not as impressive as I'd thought.

I sorted through the contents of both boxes, taking inventory of every scrap of paper on which Ex's handwriting appeared. My first surprise came when I realized I had not, in fact, amassed hundreds of documents. Playing librarian in my living room, I cataloged a mere 13 cards (four from Valentine's Days), three long letters (from the summer when I was studying abroad at Oxford), six shorter letters on torn looseleaf, one letter on what looks like construction paper that was used as gift-wrapping, and one April Fool's joke disguised as an academic warning notice. (I can't remember how he orchestrated the trick, but Ex slipped the notice into my mailbox and somehow alerted me to its presence. I was baffled and terrified. I prided myself on being a straight-A student. I rushed to the mail room. By the time I opened the letter and saw "April Fool's!," I was nearing a panic attack.) Twenty-four items total, not counting a folded foil birthday balloon. Few of the items are dated, but at least half of them came from the first two years of our relationship. Either I saved less as time went on, or we weren't nearly as epistolary a couple as I'd thought.

My second surprise came when I actually started reading. I found declarations of love - several, in fact - but none of them without accompanying statements of fear, without some element of hesitation or concern about the long-lastingness of what we had. Part of this, I think, can be credited to the turbulence of our first few months, a turbulence still fresh on our minds when half the letters were written. But this doesn't explain the other half of the letters - the absence of a definitive promise of life-long love.

Here, then, is a snapshot of Ex in his own words. This first letter, probably written near the end of year one when we were both still in college, is the closest he comes to making the promise I was searching for.

My Sweet Angel,

Tonight was very difficult for me. Spending this time, a Friday night, away from you and everyone else I care for, but I needed to find out whether I could live by myself. I now know I cannot. I took the phone cord out of the wall and did not answer the knocks. I sat at my computer in a written meditation trying to free my thoughts, my co-dependency. So many times I thought of plugging the phone back in so a voice would lure me out of this room. It was so hard fighting against this urge, it was feeding on my mind.

Around 1:30 AM I heard drums and could not resist. I'd hoped to find you [and your friend] there [at the drum circle], but neither of you were sitting amongst the music makers.

I danced for quite awhile - hoping, praying, begging to free myself to myself, but I could not find me. You've become the you of me and I'm now sure I am the me of you. It is comforting and yet scary, because I'm afraid to admit how much I crave your eternal friendship. I'm easily hurt by you. I sometimes can see and hear you resisting me. I'm lost. I don't know exactly how to be a part of you, a part that you'd cherish forever.

Is it wrong of me to let you know this thought that constantly hesitates and messes up my innter rhythm? My dance feels jagged. Should I resist what I feel? Does it scare you like it scares me?

If you are yet not dreaming open your door. I'll be waiting outside for a few moments. I feel as though I cannot sleep til I hear your voice. I missed you so much this evening.

Love,

[Ex]

Here is another letter. This one dates near the end of the first half of our relationship - probably sometime around 2001, when we were both miserable graduate students.

Dear [Steve],

I'm sorry. I really want to be the good boyfriend and cause you no pain. I hate to see you not feeling well and happy. We have got to find a way of making ourselves enjoy each other's company more - I'm at a loss on how to do that. I think we both are. It's time we had a brainstorming of ideas together.

Do not think that I'm any more happy than you are in our given departments [at graduate school]. I'm sorry that I have a hard time standing up for myself and what I want. It has always been this way since you met me. I grow weak under certain pressures, and what's worse I come away from things even more angry. I wish I knew how to put an end to this, however I do not!

Just know that I love you deeply. I know we will find away of being happy together again.

With much love and affection,

[Ex]

Finally, here is a Christmas card from December 2009 - about two years ago, the most recent document of the bunch.

[Printed on the card:] Your friendship brightens my holidays.

[In Ex's handwriting:] And it brightens my life, my worth, my thoughts, my dreams, and keeps you in my heart at all times.

Love,

[Ex]

What stands out to me most about Letter #1 is Ex's "co-dependency," something that emerges again in Letter #2 when he writes, "I'm sorry that I have a hard time standing up for myself and what I want." His promises of lifelong devotion in Letter #1 - he "craves [my] eternal friendship" and hopes to "cherish [me] forever" - are embedded in fear, built on the idea that he literally cannot survive without me. I knew he felt this way; in fact, even after the end of our tug-of-war, I used his insecurities to control him, to keep him close lest he cheat on me again or realize he didn't need me after all. Throughout our 12 years together, I never completely trusted him. Part of this, again, can be chalked up to our rocky beginnings, but a larger part of it came from my own personal baggage. I felt homely, unfuckable, isolated. The idea that someone as swan-like as Ex could fall for me seemed unfathomable. Little did I know back then that Ex had not been born a swan. He, too, harbored his own fears of being ugly and unlovable.

Not surprisingly, all of this resulted in extreme co-dependency on both ends. I doubted his ability to love me and the extent to which I deserved his or anyone's love; consequentially, I needed him to love me, for if he didn't, that meant my deepest fears about myself were true. Similarly, Ex needed me to love him; either that or  he would be cast out in the cold, facing certain death.

To sustain my love, he put on the charm, romanced me at every turn, and deferred to my judgement on almost everything, from the choice of movies we watched to the rate at which our lives became increasingly intermingled. He didn't "move in" to my dorm room until I was ready, nor did we share a bed, adopt a cat, or purchase a dog until I felt certain it was time. Sometimes he got tired of waiting. Occasionally he would insist on his own choices - especially of movies, since we were both cinephiles. This usually resulted in a fight. I would get hard-headed and arrogant. He would stamp his feet, slam doors, bang on various surfaces, and eventually sustain an injury, usually by flinging himself onto the bed or into a chair and slamming some rogue part of his body into a wall. One time he hit his face against a windowsill and gave himself a bloody nose. I went from criticizing his taste in film to ordering him off the bed, frantically rushing a tissue to his nose before he bled onto the sheets and carpet. We joked about it afterwards. How could I stay mad at him after he bashed his face against a windowsill? How could I find him anything but vulnerable, childish, and adorable as he looked up at me from his bloody tissue, eyes melting with apology?

Those eyes could soften resistance as a hot spoon softens ice cream. Whenever he wanted something from me that I was too afraid or stingy to give, he used his eyes, his baby voice ("Sthephen, pweathse...?"), his cock, his prowess on the dance floor, his infinitely charming, dimpled smile. He did this because his adoptive mother had trained him to use anything at his disposal to get what he wanted, including love. But he also did it because I left him few alternatives.

I'm not the good boyfriend in this part of the story. I loved him beyond the boundaries of my own skin, but I'd also decided that the more I loved him, the more power I gave him to decimate me completely should he one day realize the "truth" - that I was ugly, unfuckable, and didn't deserve him. Of course, this was no more "the truth" than the story of the first Thanksgiving as I learned it in second grade; it was a distortion of bodily-dysmorphic and near-psychotic proportions, but I was only vaguely aware of this at the time, having yet to hit the couch in an earnest attempt to examine my own self-hatred. Around the end of year two, Ex confessed that he'd cheated on me - twice, with two different men. He begged me, sobbing, not to leave him. I was angry, but never for a moment did I consider leaving. I didn't tell him this. As I held him in my arms, assuring him everything would be okay, I thought to myself, "now he'll never leave me." This selfless act of forgiveness would forever put him in my debt. I was trading in the currency of love like a banker; he would never be able to repay the interest on this loan, so now I would truly have him - forever.

So much for that.

I was not a good boyfriend in the beginning - not even for the first three years. But I became a better one as a result of my depression and twice-weekly sessions with my therapist. I'm still self-conscious about my appearance, as my attempt at humor on Day 41 attests. But for the first time in my life, I was finally confronting my feelings about being gay and the degree to which those feelings had been warped by more than a decade of name-calling and hetero-socialization. I was a mess, sad and hysterical to the point of uncontrollable nausea and vomiting. Boyfriends across the world have been scared off by less, but Ex stood faithfully by my side. Actually, the urgency of my depression blindsided him as much as it did me; he didn't so much stand by my side as helplessly look on, sometimes from a distance and sometimes with his arms around me as I cried and panicked and clung to him for support. Gone were my self-defenses, my carefully measured give and take of love and leverage. Now it was my turn to wear my co-dependency on my sleeve. I simply couldn't imagine surviving a night without him.

This marked a crucial shift in our relationship. I was still controlling. I became even more so for a time, bristling at every person or opportunity that threatened to take Ex away from me. But I was no longer the stubbornly dependable partner, the (relatively) hard-hearted and rational yin to Ex's (mostly) emotional flower-bed of a yang. Imagine sharing your life with someone who is both controlling and depressed. I take many jabs at Ex, but the fact is, he stayed. Thank god for his co-dependence and his love. He truly deserved a medal.

In retrospect, I'm grateful for the depression. It forced me to confront some serious demons. It's at this point in the story that I finally begin to conduct myself more healthily, in life as well as in my relationship. I started medication. I applied for my Masters in Playwriting and got accepted to several prestigious programs. At the end of my first year of studies, I secured a teaching fellowship that covered my tuition and paid a modest stipend. Ex, meanwhile, had gotten a job at the college - a tenure track job. Our sex-life had taken a hit, mostly as a result of the meds, but otherwise, these were our happiest years. I still vetoed his movie choices, but he no longer had to injure himself to get me to reconsider. My friendship "brightened his life, his worth, his thoughts, his dreams," and his brightened mine.

Then came the change - the change I've discussed amply elsewhere.

Ex began to hate his job at the same time he was becoming addicted to it. His combination of charm and passion for theatre meant that many of his students worshiped him. For the first time in his adult life, he had succeeded in taking the number-one spot in other people's hearts. It wasn't exactly love he had earned, but respect. His students revered him, and he started going to great lengths to reinforce their perceptions. His training as a dancer had given him perfect posture, but now he seemed to stand even taller, chin forever hovering at a 100 degree angle from his neck, always pointing just slightly towards the heavens. He started dressing all in black, insisting his students do the same. He chose shoes specifically for the sounds they made against the linoleum flooring in the halls - sharp heels that made sharp, threatening sounds, announcing his presence and instilling fear before his students could even see him.

He was developing a classroom persona - something most teachers do. But most of us do it to claim a very specific kind of authority in the classroom, one that's not so much about us as diffusing potential obstacles to students' learning. I was 22 years old when I taught my first college class. Before the first day of the semester, I took Ex shopping to help me pick out a professional wardrobe, one that would make me look serious, professorial, and at least eight years older. I knew my students might not take me seriously as someone only four years their senior, so I worked to develop a persona that would remove this obstacle. From 1:15 to 2:25 every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, I did my best to play the role of a man in his early 30s.

Ex manufactured a persona that masked his insecurities, and in this sense he did well - insecurity on the part of a teacher can be a very real obstacle to gaining trust and respect from students. The problem was that the persona began to take on a life of its own. Ex fashioned himself into an amalgam of his heroes of dance, theatre, and film, borrowing Martha Graham's austerity, Stella Adler's ferocious gesticulation, and Miranda Priestly's whispery-soft but deadly voice and stare, rolling them all into one larger-than-life package. He reveled in reports of students speaking in awe about his "death stare." He concealed the machinery behind his appearance - the hours it would take him to prepare the day's ensemble, spray on some extra hair, moisturize every square inch of his face. He lied to students and colleagues about his age, the origins of certain articles of clothing (a Yohji Yamamoto coat, which he claimed to have received as a personal gift from the designer after Yamamoto plucked him from the NYC streets to model it on a private runway). At a party on campus for students arranged by the LGBT and drama clubs, he danced alone in his very own makeshift cage high in the rafters. At his direction, the students rigged a special light just for him. The DJ announced his entrance, and he shook his moneymaker to the whoops and applause of the 18-to-22-year-olds below.

He had conquered the college, but it was a small victory. He had transformed himself into a demi-God of urbane good taste, but his disciples extended only as far as the circumference of a community college campus in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. He received plaudits for his art, but his art now consisted mostly of directing students in community theatre productions of Shakespeare and big-name musicals. Added to this, his Martha Graham-Stella Adler-Miranda Priestly routine had begun to get him in trouble. He indignantly cursed out a student via e-mail because she had sent him a viral chain letter. He threw a stack of essays to the floor in front of his students to make a point of just how disappointed he was in their work. He cultivated friendships with some students, opening himself to accusations of favoritism by others. His dean began to threaten his job. Once again, Ex found himself "grow[ing] weak under certain pressures" and "com[ing] away from things even more angry."

This quote is from Letter #2, written at least five years before he started teaching at the college. But the past was repeating itself, as it had done again and again ever since his adoptive mother signed the paperwork but refused to award him equal place in her affections. Here was yet another situation in which he found himself denied the approval - read: the love - he had worked so tirelessly to ensure. For all his missteps, he had invested thousands of hours into his work. He was too weak to stand up for himself, so I - his partner, now also his colleague - did what I had done so well prior to my depression. I stood up for him.

When I began this post, I hadn't intended to write the abridged history of my entire relationship. I was inspired by Ex's letters and my session with Melanie to dig for truth, for the best and most comprehensive understanding I could reach of why our relationship ended. What, then, to make of all this?

First, I did tremendous damage to the relationship during its first half, and I would be stupid not to take responsibility for this and try to learn from it. I was a bully. I spotted Ex's weaknesses early on and exploited them because I was convinced he wouldn't stay with me otherwise. My romance with H might not be long for this world. Already he's concerned by the awkward starts and stops of our conversation, and although he says he's attracted to me (and I'm certainly attracted to him), he feels a certain lack of chemistry, of romance and sparks. It hurt me to hear this, as I wanted so badly to be "onto the next thing," to keep pace with Ex and his two-hour transition from 12-year partnership to tango-dancing underwear model. But if this is the only reason I want H - merely as a "next thing," an attempt at parity with my ex-partner - then better the sparks never fly. Either way, I will not play mind games with H or any of my future boyfriends. I will not manipulate a lover for fear that I am simply too awkward and unattractive to deserve his love.

My second conclusion: our relationship was deeply co-dependent and, in many ways, simply not healthy. This  isn't to say it was entirely unhealthy, but it was built by two very young and deeply wounded people. In a sense, Ex and I grew up together. At the same time, we symied each other's growth, propping each other up when the two of us should have been learning individually to keep our own balance. He taught me so much about myself, and I hope to have done the same for him. But this is the kind of relationship one should grow out of. If only unconsciously, perhaps Ex understood this. Perhaps he realized that we needed time apart, that each of us needed to grow up on his own. Then again, there is Ex's choice of a new partner - a man who never went to college, who is all of 26 years old, who is jack of no trades and master of one; a man who might understandably look up to someone like Ex, perhaps with the same fervor as one of his applauding, whooping students.

This brings me to my final conclusion: Ex broke up with me because he knew we were crippling each other, but he jumped straight into a new relationship because he was afraid of standing, broken-boned, on his own. More than anything else, this is why I'm angry at him. I'm angry that he made such an important decision for both of us, one that I should have made myself at least two years before. I'm angry that I had no control over his decision; I'm angry at myself for continuing to crave control, even as I know I must learn to relinquish this need if I'm ever to mend my own busted limbs. But most of all I'm angry at him for Sven, his second choice. His first choice - to break up with me - was painful but necessary. His second choice - to jump into a new relationship with a saucer-eyed 26-year-old - undermines the value of first. Granted, it undermines the value for him, not me. Really, I have no right to be angry. And yet I'm angry anyway.

Here, I think, is where I must defer to the healing powers of time - those powers which are no less efficacious for being cliché. Here is also where I must dim the spotlight on Ex and his motives. I have no doubt that I will continue to write about him, be angry at him, love him, and marvel at his unconscious wisdom as well as his conscious stupidity. But if our origin story reveals anything besides a deeper look at his motives, it's my own evolution as a caped crusader of control, as Captain Co-dependent. I do not want to repeat the same mistakes, at least not in same way I made them with Ex.

In the world comic books, origin stories can span all of one issue. In the real world, however, human beings continuously re-originate. We are ever-evolving and -becoming, even as we confront and never truly defeat countless variations of the same enemies. My enemy is not Ex, nor is the co-dependence that brought me to him, nor the self-hatred that fed it. That hatred inspired me to love another person as best as I could, and I do not believe our love is any less valuable for its fetid roots, just as flowers are no less beautiful that spring from manure.

Before me lies the next chapter of my origins story. Ex may be trying to ignore his demons, but I will not do the same with mine; I will not allow them to overtake my Metropolis. I must examine each monster, searching for others whose faces I don't recognize because they have changed since we last did battle. In this, I think, lies the key to my next transformation. In this, I think, my only real enemy would be a refusal to look my monsters in the eyes.