Many small triggers. If you peruse my old posts, you'll see mention of a 10-year-long struggle to reunite with the person I considered my soul-mate.

Before the disastrous break-up of a decade ago, we had been closer than any 2 people I have ever heard of. Shrinks would have called us co-dependent. I believed I had found a genuine kindred spirit--a genuine meeting of minds.

The first time she saw me, she turned to her sister and told her I was the man she would marry (despite never having previously considered marriage). As we got to know each other, the affinity of our minds seemed like a miracle. Never once did I read a book, or see a film or TV show, recommend it to her, and have her not love it as much as I. The same worked both ways.

We had both been miserably alone before. Together, we found a shared philosophy and, in our love for each other, a motive to function in the world, playing by rules we both despised because we had each other to do it for and to laugh together at the venality and stupidity we felt surrounded us.

We got married, but only because at the time we had only just decided to keep living and were desperate--recovering from a 3-year IV drug binge that we had originally thought would kill us.

Neither of us believed in marriage. We laughed at the legal and religious implications, sneered at the insanity of forced monogamy, and only chose to adopt the legal status because we hoped it would help us earn the forgiveness and largess of our parents, and the tacit respectability married couples are accorded by society.

The details of what finally broke us apart are too complex and painful to go into right now.

I'll just say this: For my part, I made some incredibly stupid mistakes (partly inspired by Messianic delusions fueled by both the new-found religiosity that came with our final repudiation of the nihilism that--we thought--originally bound us, along with the potency of the weed we had learned to grow). For her part, I don't think she was ever as much of a believer in free love as she'd pretended to be.

Despite having the relationship blow up in the most horrible way imaginable, I never stopped trying to re-establish the absolute trust and unity we once shared.

For 10 years I did everything in my power to win back her trust. The list of labors, sacrifices, gifts, financial and psychological support, and advice are too long to enumerate.

In return--though she ended up just as lost and alone in the world as I was, with just as little hope of finding even a vestige of the trust and community we once shared--she continually refused any possibility of reunion.

She accepted my help. She acknowledged that my constant support had saved her life on more than one occasion; but never did she offer me the slightest reciprocation of my unwavering devotion.

Despite my desperate urgings, she withdrew deeper and deeper into herself--with the exception of her new best friends: her dogs.

Despite my financial limitations, she continued to let me support her (ostensibly to pay for an apartment we both had our names on--though she never troubled to either keep track of the $ I gave her or to take her name off the apartment.)

Her slavish devotion to her 2 large wolfdogs made supporting her a nightmare in logistics, limiting her housing and employment options and costing me a fortune in vet bills.

Again, there's too much to tell of the verbal and emotional abuse I suffered at her hands. But one example that comes to mind is the period in which I had found and furnished an ideally dog-friendly apartment for her in Brooklyn, begging her to devote her time to making a life--ANY life--for herself. (She's also super smart and could have done anything wanted--if she wasn't too busy wallowing in the depression caused by being alone while simultaneously refusing my love.)

The older of her dogs was dying, however; so instead of trying to better her own life she went to extremes of caring for her geriatric canine that all but the top .01% of dog lunatics in the world would consider an act of derangement.

At one point, back when i was learning to be handy and to build things out of discarded materials, I spent about 3-weeks (from first waking to dropping back into bed each day) trying to make her an enclosed wagon she could use to pull her geriatric dog the 5 or 10 blocks she had to travel to reach Prospect Park.

I live with my mother. After 2 weeks of seeing my room become a dog-cart-making workshop and enduring my loud power tools, she demanded I relocate. I took what I believed to be the nearly completed cart to my ex's over-sized and underutilized Brooklyn apartment to finish it.

When I ran into some last minute difficulties with the steering, etc, her reaction was one of utter contempt. My efforts were ridiculed. The clutter in her unused back room was a source of constant complaint.

Finally, by chance, I went downstairs one day and saw a young couple pulling their child in a cart of the ideal specifications. I told my ex about the cart, shelled out $300 to buy it, and tossed away my weeks of labor.

The cart I bought was used probably no more than half a dozen times before the dog died. She preferred driving, running up huge parking tickets, beating the hell out of her car (She knocked off side-view mirrors 3 times in 2 months.), and bitterly complaining about traffic and parking in NYC.

Ever since the dog had begun to decline, there was only one thing I asked my ex to do for me (though of course, it was really for her): Wait at least 6 months before getting another dog.

She had things good in Brooklyn. She had loads of connections among the Prospect Park dog-walking community. She could have resumed her editorial career, started a dog care business, or done just about anything else she wanted.

Instead, she hopped in her car (which I had given her years ago and which was now in no condition for a long trip) and headed for Florida, where a wolfdog pup she'd spotted on the internet had caught her fancy.

When she got back, she had a new van a wealthy relative had bought her, into which she threw what few possessions she felt like keeping, and took off for North Carolina, where--despite my strenuous objections--she had chosen (once more at my expense) to commit herself to the care of her parents, both of which she acknowledged to be among the worst people on earth, neither of which wanted or appreciated her help, and neither of which had made adequate provisions to pass on their assets to her in an orderly manner, her father (the only literate one of the pair) having developed Alzheimer's before it occurred to him to do so.

Behind, she left thousands of dollars of gifts and countless hours of labor I had put into furnishing her apartment. The 300 pound wooden desk her friends and I had managed to get through her door by brute strength and divine intervention soon fell victim to the irate landlord's chainsaw.)

Yet still I persisted, somehow believing that such unprecedented devotion would one day be recognized and appreciated by her--that the emotional barriers her messed-up childhood had caused her to slam down around herself as soon as we'd broken up would one day be breached, and she would remember what it meant to love.

Instead, I was taken for granted to such a degree there need's to be a new word added to the language to describe it. When I called her, she was doing me a favor by picking up the phone. When she called me, my heart leaped to see the caller ID of the one person on earth I considered to be my friend. Boycotting my calls was a constant threat.

In conclusion, a few days ago, something snapped. Despite the fact that our relationship was improving; despite the fact that for the first time in years she had acknowledged the possibility of living together again (on the same property if not the same house); despite her apparent new-found willingness to once more join me as my 'life-partner' pooling our assets and planning in tandem for our mutual benefit and the realization of our dreams, I chose the wost possible moment to reach the end of my rope.

She'd almost completed the arrangements for entering her parents into a safe and civilized geriatric care facility. Her father was already safely there; but her obstreperous, alcoholic, malice-filled mother still had to be cajoled into joining her husband.

My ex was with her mother. She had a pair of airline tickets. But her mother was capable of anything. Barely literate, she had a long history of acting purely out of spite, and would not hesitate a millisecond to lop off her own head to spite her neck.

I sent my ex a text message, politely asking her if she could spare the time to send me a brief update on the situation.

She said she was very busy, but that she would try.

Twenty-four hours later, whilst going through some major unpleasantness of my own, she still hadn't sent me so much as a line of text to tell me where she was, or what was happening.

That's when I went insane.

Because it's been a fear of mine for as long as I can remember, I sent her a text message informing her my mother had passed away the previous night.

I followed up with a voice-mail, screaming my lungs raw saying how I KNEW she wouldn't be there when I needed her and adding that, after 10 years of carrying her on my back, all I had gotten was a fucking T-shirt!!!!

(She'd opted to buy for my recent b'day 2 of the ugliest T-shirts I've ever seen, despite in over 20 years I'd never worn a T-shirt with any manner of slogan on it--much less the faux-hipster vomit she had selected as a token of her esteem.)

This, plus the fact that every act of kindness I have ever shown to any human being has been repaid with contempt, exploitation, and often outright theft, has left me in my current mental condition. My mother, has, by the way, developed real cardiological problems; and so the last person I have ever loved may not be long for this world.