Forty four, out where the city stops, and I quite like the emptiness
Posted as inland_and_flat
- Looking for
- one person, patient, who does not need the middle of town around them
- Experience
- Sixteen years, both directions, two dynamics of several years each.
- Around
- the outer ring, Madrid
Everybody who writes to me from the middle of Madrid asks, in some form, whether I am not terribly isolated out here. It is forty minutes on the train. There are two hundred thousand people between me and the ring road. I have a job, a house I own outright and a view of a plain that goes on until it stops being a view and becomes weather.
Forty four, switch, sixteen years. Two dynamics of real length, one of five years and one of three, both with people who lived within twenty minutes of here, which surprises the centre people more than anything else I could tell them.
What is actually true is that the pool out here is thin and that everybody in it is careful, because where the neighbours have known your mother for thirty years discretion is not a personality trait, it is a necessity. It makes people slow to answer and honest when they do.
What I want is one person for a long time. I lead about sixty per cent of the time and I am content with any ratio that is genuinely negotiated. Very little interest in pain. Enormous interest in rules, service, and the kind of dynamic that is mostly invisible from outside.
I can come into the centre on a weekend without it being a production. I would rather not do it every week. If you are somebody who has been thinking about moving out this way and wondering whether there is anything here, the honest answer is that there is very little, and that the little is worth knowing.