Two of us in a very small flat, and what we want is letters
Posted as letters_from_nowhere
- Looking for
- correspondents, honestly, more than we want visitors
- Experience
- Together twenty two years, a dynamic between us for eleven.
- Around
- the 10th, Paris
We are going to be honest about the shape of what we want, because posts like ours usually pretend to be looking for something more conventional and then disappoint everybody. We are not really looking for people to meet. We are looking for people to write to.
We are fifty five and fifty eight, in fifty square metres on a fourth floor with no lift, in a building where you can hear which neighbour is arguing. He leads, I do not, and we have run our life this way for eleven years with almost nobody knowing.
The only person we know in this moved abroad four years ago and we see her twice a year. The rest of our contact with anybody who understands any of this has been in writing, and over eleven years we have discovered that we prefer it. A long letter every fortnight from somebody thinking carefully is worth more to us than an evening of small talk.
So: correspondents. People with something to say about how they do this, what they have learned, what they got wrong. We would write back at length. We are both readers and both quite funny on paper and considerably less so in person.
If a correspondence eventually produced a very long lunch, we would be glad of it, though we should say now that we have nowhere to put anybody. But that is not the point of the post and we did not want to bury the actual request under a more normal sounding one. We are not looking for anything that would need to happen in a room.