Its amazing how time really can help heal some wounds. I remember I used to say to you that if we ever broke up I would never be able to pass your house without dying a little. I can now pass it and even look up at your bedroom window, which held so many memories for me, and I don't feel any pain.

I am writing this because we really didn't have an ending. We just used each other a long time after our relationship had died, pretending we actually still needed each other. I hated you. I hated me. The way you talked to me and treated me I think that maybe you always hated me. Hate and love are just two sides of the same coin, and in my heart now I know that of the two emotions- you hated me more than you loved me.

Never had anyone hurt me the way you did. I trusted you with blind faith. I loved you with the innocence I now don't have. I accept this as a mistake I made. I made an error of judgement and being stubborn I didn't want to admit to myself or to others that I was wrong about you, and that they were right.

I think one of the worse things that can happen in a relationship is when one person is too weak to end it, so they make a conscious or subconscious decision to hurt the other person so much that the other has to leave, therefore the decision to end the relationship is not theirs. That's what you did to me. So spineless and lacking in compassion you wouldn't make a clean break with me. You kept me hanging. The noose around my neck was something you controlled but that I helped you slip over my head. You would hold me up when you need someone to make you feel worthy, then drop me down to leave me to choke when you had got your fix.

They say that each person you have a relationship is really a mirror of your inner strengths and flaws. I saw the worst I had within me throughout my time knowing you. Years later I am still haunted by this. I never thought I was that weak, that pitiful, that cruel, that violent, that needy, and that pathetic. I was.

What the real purpose of writing this is to thank you. Through knowing you it allowed me to see the weakness of my psyche. You helped reveal to me the deep seeded fears I have fought since my childhood. The experience has helped me see that although I thought I would die without you, I was dying being with you. I'm still alive and even though knowing you broke my heart I would never wish I didn't know you.

The sadness the echoed in every breath I took in the three years of knowing you was not because of you. It was that I was so disappointed with me. The me I knew would not let someone like you come anywhere near my world. But I did. I let you push me, hit me, humiliate me, touch me, betray me.

It has been about two and a half years since that last phone call and I am making a choice right now to trust someone again. I am going to let someone know me who is worthy of knowing me. Being with you taught me so much about the dark depths of the human spirit, but I'm not going to give you the power of affecting my life any more. If I get hurt again, so be it.

I survived after you tore me apart. And that's the best thing you taught me. If I'm strong enough to live after all the crap you tried to kill me with then I can survive anything. And I will.

I wish you well Danny.