I have written this eleven times and this is the shortest one
Posted as too_many_drafts
- Looking for
- someone who will read a long message without sighing
- Experience
- Ten years, both directions, one dynamic of five years.
- Around
- Belleville, Paris
I work with words all day and it has ruined my ability to write anything about myself. Eleven drafts. One of them was two thousand words and read like a legal deposition. This is attempt twelve and I am going to leave the awkward parts in.
Thirty eight, Paris, switch, ten years. One dynamic of five years that ended three years ago when she moved to Brussels, and since then a series of conversations that I have talked to death before anything could happen. That is the pattern I am trying to break and I am naming it here so that somebody can hold me to it.
I lead and I follow, genuinely both, and the ratio has shifted over the years without my ever deciding it. What I am best at is the slow construction of something: rules that get more specific over months, a private language, the accumulated business of knowing somebody.
What I am worst at is the moment where the writing has to stop and a person has to be met. I overprepare. I turn up having imagined four versions of the evening and am then no good at the actual one.
So what would help is somebody who is a little more decisive than me, in either direction, and who will at some point say that we have written enough. I am in the north east of the city, my hours are my own, and I can be free in the day. I do not want anything that requires me to be certain about what I am before we start.