We wrote for nine months and lived ten minutes apart the entire time
- Looking for
- somebody who will name a day inside the first fortnight
- Experience
- Five years, one dynamic, and one very long correspondence.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
Nine months of daily messages with a woman who lived a ten minute ride from my front door. We covered everything. Terms, limits, what a week would look like, what we would do if it stopped working. We never met. It ended in March when she said, kindly and accurately, that she thought we had both been enjoying the writing instead of the thing.
She was right. That is the part I have had to sit with. It was not shyness and it was not scheduling. In a city where distance is not an obstacle, a nine month correspondence is a decision, made daily, by both of us, to keep something at the size where it could not disappoint anybody.
Thirty five, the west, submissive, five years in.
So my terms now are almost rude in their simplicity. A few messages, a call if you want one, then a public coffee inside two weeks, or we stop and neither of us takes it personally. I would rather be turned down in week one than agreed with for nine months.
What I want after that is an ongoing arrangement with a shape. Standing expectations, a fixed evening, correction that happens at the time. Not looking for a pen pal, however good the writing is, and I know exactly how good it can be.