He reached out, now I’m angry

It was a short, cordial friendly-ish email earlier this week that was “work-related”. He was also in my hometown on a work trip. It had been NC for six months initiated by me, and I was pretty far along the path of forgetting. I wrote back a short cordial friendly-ish email a couple days later (I do want to stay on good terms, since we work in the same field), and he wrote back once more (same tone), which I’m not going to respond to. He’s probably testing the waters, and he probably meant it to be nice. I do want to be friends eventually, though it would not have been me breaking the silence. And now I feel SO ANGRY at him because it has made me think about him again. Plus nothing said about the huge emotional elephant in the room sitting between us, and I just don’t think there’s any way we could be friends again without having a conversation about what happened, but I don’t want to initiate that conversation, and he’s a dismissive-avoidant man-child so he probably won’t. Damn I’m so mad. Ugh.