The best hour of that whole month, and neither of us said much

I had eleven years of it with one person and what I miss is not a single evening from the first year. It is a Wednesday somewhere around year six when neither of us said very much and it was the best hour of that month. That is the thing I am trying to find again, and it is not a thing anybody can start with.

Thirty nine, the south of the city, nineteen years in, both ends. It finished three years ago for ordinary reasons and we are still fond of each other. I am not writing from heartbreak. I am writing from having had the good version and knowing precisely what it is made of, which is repetition and time and very little else.

So I read this board with a mild sense of being in the wrong shop. Almost everything here is about beginnings, and beginnings are the part I find least interesting. I would skip the first year outright if that were on offer, and it is not, and I know it is not.

So I am after somebody who wants to reach the dull part on purpose. That means being willing to be unexciting together fairly early, and keeping an evening in the calendar through a stretch where neither of us feels particularly inspired, because that stretch is where the entire thing is actually built.

Not after intensity. Not after somebody who needs every evening to be an occasion. And not after anybody currently in their first six months of this, which is a lovely place to be and not where I am going.