Rope bottoms · Neukölln, Berlin
I moved here from a country where everybody knew everybody
Pinned as came_to_disappear
- Wants
- somebody who understands why anonymity was the whole point
- Rope so far
- Twelve years, most of them extremely visible, four of them not.
- Around
- Neukölln, Berlin
Where I am from, the whole of this consisted of about sixty people and I knew all of them. Everyone knew who I had been with, in what order, and why each thing had ended. It was safe and it was completely airless, and I left partly for work and largely to be nobody for a while.
Four years later I am still enjoying it. Nobody here has an opinion about my history because nobody here knows it. That has been an enormous relief and it has one obvious cost, which is that nobody can tell me anything about anybody either.
Forty one, Neukölln, twelve years in this. The way I have adapted is to be slow. I talk to somebody for a long time before anything happens and I have stopped feeling apologetic about the pace.
What I want is a real partnership, over years, with somebody who has their own life and does not need us to be a public fact.
Not looking for anybody who wants my history in the first month, which I will tell eventually and not to a stranger. Not looking for someone who knows a lot of people from my country, which sounds paranoid and is simply how this works. And not looking for anything that would put either of us in a photograph.