Notes from a Slow City

I spent a month walking the same three streets at different hours.

The baker who opens at five and hums to himself. The woman who feeds the cats behind the laundromat. The way the light comes down the eastern wall at four in the afternoon and turns the brick the color of an old photograph.

Cities reveal themselves to the patient. What looks like sameness on the first day becomes, by the third week, a dense and legible text. I am only beginning to learn to read it.