Steelwork: thank you for taking the time to reply! Its been 9 months NC here and, quite frankly i'm frustrated with myself. I should not even care at this point. What was the last contact you had, just out of curiousity?
The last meaningful contact was on his birthday in mid-March. Things had ended quite suddenly between us (i.e. he informed me by email that he was in a new relationship) three months earlier, but we were in limited contact. He hinted a few times that we had unfinished business, sending dreams about me and stuff like that. At my request he agreed to meet and talk about what had happened.
This was during the really bad days, when I wasn't eating or sleeping much. I was not thinking straight. I certainly wasn't thinking about BPD, though I was beginning to suspect NPD. I was, in fact, privately making connections between his behavior and my mother's. But I still desperately wanted to see him in person, to talk about what had happened, to clear the air. I wanted him back, but I had already told him I accepted the situation. I just wanted to be on good terms, because I liked him but also because I was still in love and hoped the bridge would not be burned and if things went south with the new girl and he'd turn back to me.
But then he started avoiding and deflecting--only replying to select parts of my emails. I had been putting on a brave face, trying not to show how I was hurting, and I was still tiptoeing around trying not to f*ck things up worse, but I couldn't take the cat and mouse after a while. I let him know that I just wanted an answer about if he ever intended to have the conversation with me. I also let him know that I was having trouble sorting through everything, and that I was going through some rough stuff.
The deflecting continued. So I let things lie for a few weeks. Then on his birthday I wrote and said happy birthday, that it felt weird not to be friends after all. He sent a reply: "Aren't we friends?" he said. "I thought we were friends. Just letting things settle down, blah blah." Then he went on about his petty life bummers (mind you, this is while he was, unbeknownst to me, apartment-hunting with my replacement). I wrote back and said I'd told him a few things I needed to feel there was a friendship, and when he didn't respond to that, I felt I had to take his non-response as an answer. That set him off, and he replied: "I must have missed that email, because I didn't know about the terms and conditions."
And that was it, the end. I replied saying that his tone was really mean, and that the "terms and conditions" I put on friendship were pretty straightforward: that he care about and respect me. But he didn't respond, so I left it there until early October, when I learned he'd moved in with the girl back in April. We had a kept blog together, and I sent a note saying I'd run into a mutual friend (this is how I heard about him and her living together), and that this reminded me I needed to take the blog down. I said I wanted to let him know in case he wanted to keep anything from it, and I hoped he was well. He wrote back that no thanks he didn't need anything from the blog, hoped I was well, and said, "X [mutual friend] is a cool cat."
I puzzled for a while over whether that last line was an invitation for more chat. In the end, though, I just left it there, and that was the last time I heard from him at all.
Sorry for the long response. I'm having a rough time these last few days.
