Rope bottoms · the Jersey side, New York
I go to two different circles here and belong to neither
Pinned as two_scenes_neither
- Wants
- somebody else without a crowd, who is fine being nobody's protégée
- Rope so far
- Eight years, spread thinly across two groups that do not overlap.
- Around
- the Jersey side, New York
There are at least four separate rope scenes in this area and they barely acknowledge one another. I go to two. In one of them I am the person who comes occasionally, and in the other I am the person who comes occasionally, and in neither am I anybody's. That has taken eight years to achieve and I am no longer sure it was an achievement.
Thirty six, the Jersey side, eight years in. The advantage is real: I have never inherited anybody's argument and I have never had a breakup discussed by forty people. The cost is that when something went wrong two years ago there was nobody I could call, because everybody I knew was a person I saw once a month and liked.
So what I am after is not a community. It is one person to be properly known by. I would rather have one relationship with real depth in it than a wide acquaintance with a hundred people who would struggle to describe me.
I lean towards long, quiet and domestic. A standing evening, a lot of ordinary time around it, and eventually somebody who notices when I have gone quiet without my having to announce it.
Not looking for anybody who wants to bring me into their crowd as a project. Not looking for someone who needs the approval of a room. And not looking for anything that requires me to pick a side in an argument I was not present for.