What does "Start Over" mean exactly? Hm...

This is my story.
I met "Jack" while working and living in another country, and he fell instantly in love with me. We talked for several hours at an expat bar and went on a date the next day, in which I kind of sort of lost my virginity. At first I was just relieved and excited to lose it, and to such a sweet guy... whereas he was apparently head over heels for me and immediately wanted to see me constantly for the next few weeks. After that, things fizzled out for a bit and he told me that he couldn't date me because I had told him initially that I wasn't interested in marriage and having children. (I mean, I was a virgin, what do you want from me? I was practically a child!) All this was so strange to me because he is younger than I am, and seemed to be ready to settle down.

I was pretty devastated at first to have him disappear the first time after our "honeymoon" period ended, but we ended up running into each other a few weeks later and hooking up again. Then we started hanging out more together, pretty much sleeping together every single time we saw each other. I was making up for lost time and also falling heavily and deeply in love with Jack, and reevaluating my initial stance on marriage. It was wonderful and sweet ... every time we kissed I literally saw stars. Love songs began making sense... I was just floating.

Then he continued to be flaky, telling me that he couldn't be in a relationship because he was too focused on his career in this country and we were too different. I didn't think it mattered, and tried my best to communicate this to him... but finally he moved cities for work. He would come back into my city sometimes and we would (you guessed it) sleep together. We hardly ever hung out during the day, but I would get phone calls from him late at night because he missed me.

So we were never really "together" in a boyfriend girlfriend sense because he defined dating as being very serious and monogamous and an audition for marriage, basically. He's also very religious and I am not so much...

But he wasn't sleeping with anyone else during the time we were together. He just didn't think he could commit to me for some unknown reason.

I told him I loved him... and then he said it back a week later right before he moved. But then a week after he told me he loved me he said he wasn't ready "not to be single". I tried to understand. He was my first so I let him get away with a lot of things. Did I mention I was 25 when I met him?

So, then I decided to leave the country for financial reasons, and never got to say goodbye in a real way. I agonized over him for several months until I wrote an email telling him all the things that were miscommunicated throughout our weird time together. He wrote back very shortly after, saying he was sorry for everything and that I was nearly right about everything, and that he was "absolutely" in the wrong, but that he just didn't have an answer. I took the email as a final goodbye, and wrote a quick three sentence email in return telling him my plans for the next few years and that I hope he had luck where he was.

Feeling extremely torn apart by this emotional rollercoaster he'd dragged me on, I tried to move on.

Then three weeks later I got another message from him, telling me that he wanted to know if he had said anything "wrong" because my last email was kind of short. He also said he wanted to "start over" as a stranger because he felt bad about the email, even though he specifically said he wasn't talking about anything in the future or anything... "but" if I wanted to, I could talk to him any time and he would try to do so too.

That's pretty much it. My question is, what do you guys think about the meaning of "start over?" I personally took it to be starting over in a romantic sense, without the pain of the hell I went through last year clouding over my judgement. He also left the country to go back home and I think he's doing a lot of reflecting and wonder if he regrets treating me like a sex buddy without realizing how much he was hurting me, and without realizing how much he wanted me.

I also think it might be a way for him to clear his conscious of destroying a poor innocent girl's idea of how romance should be and that it should last longer than three weeks....

Who knows but him of course, but I know that guys are kind of predictable and they don't know why they act like idiots most of the time. I am still madly in love with him but I don't want our relationship to keep the same power struggle dynamics that were present before.

So should I message him? How long is good to wait? If I should, what would be a good thing to say to let him know that my love is not something to throw around anymore???? Help! Help!