Two roads diverged ...

The night before he left, he slept at my apartment. In all our constant motion we had never talked much. There was a lot of sex. There were ... Broadway shows and walks and drinks. But the only subject we ever dealt with was him moving here.

Being an actor, he wanted all that NYC had to offer. That I understood. But this tie to the girlfriend - with leaving her and moving on -- that I didn't get. I mean, you have an attachment to someone you've dated throughout high school and three years of college. But you stopped having sex with her, you've opened the door to all this, keep going. His girlfriend, Miranda, knows you're moving. Find a way to process that, both of you, and move on.

Easy for the lover in New York to say, hard for the one in Miami to do.

Early the morning he was to leave, I woke up at 6 a.m., and saw him across the living room, stretched out on the couch. He was crying. I got up.

"What am I gonna do now?" he asked. "It wasn't real until now. But being in your place, seeing your things, your cat," he laughed. "Being in your bed. Now, it's all real to and how can I go back. I love you."

That had never been said. Up till then this was an affair, a fling, something with an expiration date stamped on it. Maybe he'd come back. Maybe not. Now he tells me this.

I had been alone for so long that I'd put up an impenetrable wall and hidden behind it. But now there we were.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," says Frost. Safer to stay on my solitary course. Smarter. But if he could drop all his glibness and break down, could I? Maybe it was the stupidest thing to do, intellectually, but I decided to let myself love him. It was conscious. It was absolute. I went down the other road.

He left for Florida. We spoke that week about his plans to tell Miranda, maybe to come out to his parents.

He never came back. He stopped answering my calls and emails. That was it. That was it.

Three years later he came to town, to a club right next door to my apartment. He didn't let me know. He called to tell me that after he was safe back home. He'd moved on.

But wasn't it interesting that he had to call --