I decide in one line and I want to tell you which line

I read the first line and about eighty percent of the time I stop there. I want to be honest about that rather than pretend everybody gets a fair hearing, because the volume makes a fair hearing impossible and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The lines that stop me: anything that begins by evaluating my post. Anything that opens with what he is. Anything that starts with an apology. Anything that starts with a greeting so elaborate it takes a whole line to arrive.

The lines that work are almost always a fact. A man opened once with a sentence about the dog he had inherited from his father and did not much like. I read the whole thing and we spoke for two years. It had nothing to do with any of this. It was simply a sentence nobody else could have written.

Forty eight, Queens, seventeen years leading. The arrangement I have now is finishing this summer, amicably, because he is moving south to be near his mother, which is exactly the sort of ordinary reason things end when they have been real.

What I want next is another long one. Household duties, standing rules, service that is practical. I am not interested in scenes, occasions or anything at short notice, and I want somebody within a distance that survives a bad week in February. One true sentence. That is all the first line has to do.