Thirty years in this and never once with anyone from here
Posted as always_somewhere_else
- Looking for
- a local arrangement, at an age where travel has stopped being romantic
- Experience
- Thirty years, four dynamics, every one of them at least two hours away.
- Around
- Croix-Rousse, Lyon
Every arrangement I have had in thirty years has been with somebody in another city. Grenoble, twice. Paris, once, for four years. And one that involved a train, a bus and a walk, which I did monthly for two years in my forties and could not do now.
Fifty five, submissive, up the hill, and the reason for all that distance was simple. I was frightened of being known here, and putting a mountain range between my private life and my ordinary one felt like a solution. It worked, and it cost me an extraordinary number of hours on trains.
What has changed is that I have got tired. Not of any of this. Of the logistics, and of the peculiar shallowness of a relationship in which you only ever see somebody at their best because there is a journey attached to every meeting.
So I am trying the thing I avoided for three decades. Somebody here. Ordinary evenings. Being seen on a Wednesday when neither of us has made an effort. I want a long arrangement with structure, service and rules, and I want it to be domestic rather than an event.
I understand this city is small and that I may well end up two steps from somebody I know. At fifty five I would rather risk that than spend another decade on a platform. Not looking for anyone in another city, obviously. Not looking for something occasional. Not looking to be told I should have done this twenty years ago, which I have already said to myself at some length.