The card said nine kilometres. Nine kilometres here is fifty minutes
- Looking for
- somebody on my own side of the water, or honest about the trip
- Experience
- Four years, one dynamic of eighteen months, ended when she moved north.
- Around
- the inner west, Sydney
Nine kilometres, the card said, and I believed it for about a year. I have timed it properly since: fifty minutes on a good evening, an hour and ten in the rain, because the number the app prints is a straight line drawn across water that nobody can walk on. That line has cost me two arrangements and roughly a year of wasted Tuesdays.
Thirty two, the inner west, submissive, four years in. The pattern never varies. We match, the distance looks fine, the first meeting happens because a first meeting is exciting enough to justify the trip. The second one gets negotiated. The third one becomes a conversation about whose turn it is, and by the fifth week we are both quietly resenting a bridge.
So I have stopped pretending the crossing is a detail. If you are on the north side and you tell me it is nothing, I am going to believe you for a fortnight and then watch you learn. I would honestly rather you said it was a lot and that you were willing anyway. The two people who have said that to me plainly are the only two who ever managed it twice in a month, which I do not think is a coincidence.
What I want is weekly and unremarkable. Standing expectations that hold on an ordinary Wednesday in the middle of winter. Someone who notices when I go quiet rather than waiting for me to explain it.
Not looking for a person who wants to meet once a month and call that a dynamic. Not looking for anybody who thinks that the distance filter is a fact rather than an opinion. And not looking to be the one who does all of the travelling and is then told I am keen.