Riggers · out towards Bolton, Manchester
She ended it, she was right to, and she is at everything
Pinned as she_left_still_here
- Wants
- somebody who finds a room containing my ex entirely unremarkable
- Rope so far
- Sixteen years, one partnership of nine, ended two years ago.
- Around
- out towards Bolton, Manchester
She ended it, she was right to, and she was at the same thing I was at eleven days later. That is the shape of this city. There is no version where one of you keeps the room and the other goes elsewhere, and it took me the better part of a year to stop behaving badly about it.
Forty four, out towards Bolton, sixteen years in. Behaving badly did not mean anything dramatic. It meant leaving early, arriving late, having a slightly loud time in a corner, and once telling a mutual friend considerably more than I should have. All small. All completely obvious to everybody present. I am not proud of a minute of it.
What fixed it was time and one blunt conversation with a friend who told me I had a room of forty people managing my feelings on my behalf. She was right. Now we say hello, we are perfectly civil, and I no longer scan the room on my way through the door.
I mention all of this because it is the first thing anybody would hear about me and I would rather it arrived from here. What I want now is a long partnership with somebody who can be in a room with a woman I lived with for nine years and find that unremarkable.
If you want the story, I do not tell it. Not out of secrecy. It is hers as much as it is mine, and I have already told too much of it to too many people.