I will not meet anybody within two kilometres of my own street
Posted as never_in_my_own_town
- Looking for
- someone willing to meet in a quarter neither of us lives in
- Experience
- Thirteen years, both directions, all of it conducted elsewhere.
- Around
- the 18th, Paris
I have a very visible job in a quarter where everybody knows everybody, and I have made a rule that has held for thirteen years: nothing to do with this happens anywhere near where I live or where I work. Not a coffee, not a message read in public, nothing.
Thirty four, Paris, switch, thirteen years. What that has meant in practice is that my entire experience of this has happened at the far end of the city, always with an hour underground on either side, always coming home on the last train or the next morning.
It is not sustainable as a way to build something long, which is why I am writing rather than continuing as I have been. But the rule is not going anywhere, so what I am really looking for is somebody who finds the arrangement workable rather than absurd: a person who lives a long way from me, or somebody with exactly the same problem in their own quarter, and a habit of meeting somewhere that belongs to neither of us.
I lead slightly more than I follow and I am equally interested in both. What I want is one person for years rather than the string of two month things that this arrangement has produced so far.
I am aware that a great deal of what I am describing sounds like a person hiding a marriage. I am not married and there is nobody at home. It is my working life, entirely, and in a quarter where the baker knows my mother it is not paranoia. I would want to write for a while, and I write well, because for thirteen years writing has been most of what I have had.