I did the travel math before I wrote a word and I will show it

Fifty five minutes door to door on a weekday evening, with one change, and I have done it enough times to know it is fifty five and not the forty the map claims. I am putting the number at the top because I have watched three promising conversations die over exactly this and never once over anything about either person.

Twenty eight, Queens. Two years in, nothing that has lasted past a second month, and I have thought a lot about why. Part of it is that I am young enough to be assumed impatient, which I resent slightly and cannot argue with.

Here is what I would actually like. One fixed evening a week, in a place I can reach without an odyssey, and a set of expectations that run through the other six days and do not need either of us to travel. I am much better at the parts that happen in writing than I am at being charming in a room.

I am good at doing what I am told and bad at guessing. If a thing needs doing a particular way, tell me the way, and I will do it that way for years without needing to be reminded. What I cannot do is intuit a standard from hints, which was the whole problem with the last conversation I had.

I do not want anything at short notice. Fifty five minutes is not a spontaneous distance.