Riggers · the Bronx, New York
The circle I came up in dissolved and I barely noticed
Pinned as everybody_has_gone
- Wants
- one person, and possibly a couple of friends, at a very unhurried pace
- Rope so far
- Twenty one years, one circle, which no longer exists.
- Around
- the Bronx, New York
The group I came up in stopped, gradually, in the way these things do. Two people moved, one had children, one got ill, the person who organised everything got tired of organising everything, and by the time I looked up it had been a year since I had seen any of them. Nobody fell out. It simply ended.
Forty eight, the Bronx, twenty one years in. What I discovered is that all of my experience lived inside one small room, and outside that room I am a stranger with no history. In a smaller city that would not be possible. Here I can go to something on the other side of the bridge and be entirely new, which is disorienting at my age.
What I want is not to rebuild all that. I am too old to be starting a social project. I want one person, and possibly two or three friends, and I want to go about it slowly enough that it is real.
I should say I am not lonely in any dramatic sense. I have a family, a job I like, and a dog with opinions. This is a specific absence rather than a general one.
Not looking for anybody who wants me to be their route into a community, because I no longer have one. Not looking for something occasional. And not looking to be assessed on how long I have been doing this, which turns out to prove considerably less than everybody assumes.