Boston

Boston is the place Leo Leike chooses for a new professional and personal beginning, and the distance from Emmi Rothner gives his decision to end their correspondence practical force. But the city also becomes the setting in which he discovers that physical separation cannot simply erase an attachment built through writing: he carries Emmi with him as an idealized presence, then returns home having begun a relationship with someone he met in Boston.

A move and a break

Leo’s move follows a life-changing decision made within a few hours, though he waits nine days before telling Emmi what it will mean. In a few weeks, he plans to move to Boston for at least two years to run a project group at a university. He describes the position as attractive academically and financially, and his circumstances as allowing him to act spontaneously. The move would cost him some close friendships and time with his sister, Adrienne; he singles out Emmi as the person he expects particularly to miss.

The relocation is joined to a second decision: Leo will stop emailing Emmi. He argues that she has a family and responsibilities to which she is attached, while their written relationship may be creating confusion rather than enriching her life. Boston therefore serves not only as the destination for a university job but as the setting for an attempted separation. Leo frames leaving as a way to get Emmi out of his thoughts and to stop treating a relationship confined to his inbox as sufficient for his life.

An imagined Emmi carried across distance

Leo does not experience the move as an uncomplicated escape. He says that, for months, he has seen Emmi in beautiful women he encounters, while none can compete with the image he has made of her. He describes that image as secluded within his computer and sustained through their repeated emails: she has met him after work, accompanied his evenings, and remained present through the night. Yet she has stayed physically unattainable at every stage. In his account, the Emmi he has constructed is so delicate that an encounter in person might break the image; she exists as something created through the space between the keys on which he writes.

This tension gives Boston a double meaning. It is meant to help Leo redirect his life toward actual encounters, but the attachment he takes there remains powerful precisely because it has been preserved as an ideal. He calls Emmi a fantasy and an illusion of perfection, and says that he carries her across continents and emotional landscapes. The language makes clear that physical distance changes the circumstances of the relationship without immediately removing her from his emotional life.

Choosing a physical beginning

Leo contrasts the relationship he wants to begin in Boston with the order in which his relationship with Emmi developed. He wants to meet a woman conventionally: to see her, hear her, smell her, and perhaps kiss her. By contrast, his connection with Emmi has moved in the backward direction, from written intimacy toward the possibility of bodily presence. He calls that reversed progression exciting but incapable of leading anywhere. Boston is where he hopes to reverse course, replacing an imagined relationship with one that can develop through physical presence.

That intention is not presented as proof that his attachment to Emmi has ended. Leo admits that she has occupied his thoughts and that the constructed image has made other women seem unable to measure up. The city offers the prospect of a fresh start, not an instant emotional resolution. His decision to leave and his continuing idealization of Emmi coexist, exposing the cost of trying to make a relationship disappear by changing one’s location.

Return and a changed present

Leo is back in his home country less than a week before he writes to Emmi again, greeting her with a Christmas and New Year message even though the season is months away. His return reopens contact after the prolonged silence associated with his move, but his circumstances have changed. He says that his physical life has moved on: he has met someone in Boston, and they want to try to make a relationship work. She is considering taking a job in his home country and might move there.

Leo also looks back on the failed meeting that preceded their silence. He says that Emmi had reached a decision, though she had not wanted to admit it until the end, and that he helped her carry it out by ending their virtual relationship. He says he needed the silence and presents the separation as a way of protecting the singularity of their intimate non-encounter. In his view, their relationship reached its limit and has no future, particularly now that he has returned with another possible relationship underway. Boston thus remains central after the move is over: it is both the place where Leo tried to make a break and the place from which a changed emotional life followed him home.