The front desk has my visitor's name in a binder, twice a week

There is a binder at the front desk of my building and every guest who comes up is written into it by name, with a time in and a time out. The same name, two evenings a week, for most of a year. The woman on the evening shift has certainly noticed. I spent about ten months minding that and then one afternoon I found I had stopped.

Twenty nine, downtown, four years into this. What bothered me was never that somebody might work out the specifics. It was being legible. A person at a desk can read the shape of my week without knowing a single thing that happens once the door closes, and for a long stretch that felt like a leak I could not plug.

What ended it was arithmetic. I counted up the hours I had spent arranging my life around somebody whose job is to be pleasant to me, and the number was absurd. There are three hundred and something units in this building and she has not thought about me once.

So I host, on a schedule, in a building that keeps a record, and I am at peace with the record. What I want is a partner who does not need me to take that peace apart again. Two men have wanted the whole thing untraceable and both of them left me feeling furtive about something I had only just stopped feeling furtive about.