I stopped everything for a year and four months to look after my mother, who is now settled and comfortable and no longer needs me daily. When I came back, two of the places I had used were half empty, the one everybody had told me to avoid had become the busy one, and the etiquette had shifted in a way nobody could quite explain to me. Fifteen years of experience and I felt like somebody new.
Forty eight, the Bronx, switch. Three arrangements before the gap, the longest of them six years.
What I have worked out since is that the platforms did not change much. The people moved. A city like this has four models running at once and the population sloshes between them, and if you look away for a year you come back to the same map with all the pins in different places.
What I want is ongoing and structured, either direction, leaning towards leading. Weekly, written terms, a rhythm rather than a series of occasions.
Not looking for anybody who needs me to be current. Not looking to be caught up on vocabulary as though the underlying thing were new. And not looking for a person who will treat a year of caring for a parent as a gap that needs accounting for, because it was the most useful year of my life.