It took me a year to learn this is five searches, not one

For a year I wrote to women all over this city as though it were one place. It is not. It is five separate searches that happen to share a subway map, and the difference between a woman thirty minutes away and a woman seventy minutes away is not forty minutes, it is whether anything survives past the third month.

Thirty six, Queens, four years in. One arrangement that ran ten months and quietly died of the G train, which is a sentence a great many people here will understand without further explanation.

So I have narrowed it. Queens, north Brooklyn, or the eastern half of Manhattan. That is not snobbery about the rest of the city, it is the honest edge of what I can sustain on a weeknight after a full day, and I would rather draw it now than discover it in February.

What I want is a standing arrangement rather than occasional evenings. Duties through the week, a check that they happened, and one weeknight that belongs to somebody else. I am reliable to the point of dullness and I have never once cancelled on anybody.

What I do not want is to be told the distance is fine because we get along. I believed that for ten months. The distance is never fine, it is only tolerated, and tolerance has a shelf life that runs out somewhere around the first cold week.