Switches · Friedrichshain, Berlin
I moved across the city to avoid one person, and it half worked
Pinned as changed-districts
- Wants
- somebody unbothered by an ex who is still around at the edges
- Rope so far
- Ten years, one relationship of five, and an incomplete escape.
- Around
- Friedrichshain, Berlin
After it ended I moved to the other side of the city, which everybody told me was an overreaction and which was the best decision I made that year. I stopped seeing him. Different people, different evenings, a different tram. For about eight months it was as though the whole thing had happened to somebody else.
Then he turned up at something in the spring, because the scenes here are not as separate as they look from inside one of them, and I discovered that eight months of distance had done a great deal and not quite everything.
Thirty nine, Friedrichshain, ten years in. What I want anybody new to know is that this is the state of it: mostly resolved, occasionally not, and I will tell you when I have had one of those evenings rather than being strange about it and making you guess.
What I am looking for is one person, both directions, over a long stretch, with a life that is properly mine.
Not looking for anybody who wants an account of what happened, which is short and which I will give once and not repeat. Not looking for somebody who will treat the occasional bad evening as evidence I am not over it. And not looking for anyone who knows him, which I will ask about early and without embarrassment.