Eleven months after it ended, there she was again, third card down
- Looking for
- somebody who understands why I now read the queue with my thumb still
- Experience
- Eight years, two long arrangements, one of them recent.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
Eleven months after it ended, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, she came up third in the stack with a new photograph and a paragraph I had helped her write. I sat there holding the phone for a while. There is no setting for this. The app has no idea who anybody is to anybody. I did not swipe either way. I closed it and did not open it for a fortnight, which is the most honest reaction I have had to anything on this board.
Thirty eight, the west, switch, eight years in. Two long arrangements, the second of which is the one I have just described, and it ended for entirely ordinary reasons that neither of us has ever needed to explain.
What I have taken from it is that in a city this size there is no clean separation between your past and your queue, and there never will be. So the useful skill is not avoidance. It is being the kind of person whose exes can see them in a stack without wincing.
What I want now is an ongoing arrangement that goes both ways over time, built slowly, with somebody who has also been through an ending they handled decently.
Not looking for anybody in a hurry. Not looking to discuss her. Not looking for a person who thinks a clean slate is a thing that exists here.