The music stops and there’s the buzz of some kind of cicada hitting its head against the glass. It’s less frenetic than last week’s example tossed around by a bird in the late afternoon on a street by an Erskineville railway line. A girl stops her converse shoes to say “wow”. Perhaps the bird considers her competition because the game is suddenly up and the cicada swallowed whole.

The sky makes it summer, bright and trending lavender. I sit at the table for a moment dazzled by the shimmering green against this sky through the cinemascope slash, the post box of the kitchen window.

I remember other times of leisure, between jobs, on holidays when I wondered how people filled their days, suspected that they might have to schedule things as mundane as exercise to make it seem worthwhile. I’m walking along Prospect Street in the mid morning with a coffee in my hand, paying attention to the random debris stashed in the tiny front porches of these houses on the street – the front bench seat from a car, peeling camel vinyl reveals foam the same colour and I just know that at one touch it becomes sticky powder; a washing machine caked in dust – and everything seems worthwhile.

At the café a girl tells her curly headed companion that she always spells tonight with an ight rather than an ite, even when texting, because it’s important to her to maintain standards. He nods in agreement and his rat brown hair bobs. “Does it annoy you when I spell it ite?” he asks. She says not, but adds that she always writes you are instead of you’re.

I swear that the girl serving my coffee is Sarah Scott except that I guess Sarah Scott is at home with her children. Still, I like to think of people who look alike having the same characteristics. A certain kind of freckles – generally a light smattering – in my experience equals goodness.

I don’t want to know this city so well. I want to listen to the hum outside the silent core of Church Street and I want to wonder, to marvel at the possibilities that exist in that hum. Instead I lie on my bed and the afternoon breeze comes in, first touching the underside of my toes. It’s five and I like to think that I’m noticing the hum now because it’s the sound of the whole city heading home. Soon I’ve been worn down by the relentless history of the shetl and everything is not illuminated, everything is darkened as I slip into sleep. Voices rise above the hum and I’m back to focusing on this community rather than the whole city, and Europe and the Ukraine and the universe in which people have done atrocious deeds.

Yesterday the shuffling man arrived at the Fish Shop Café without his dog. I want to believe that the dog is just unable to travel with him on the motorized chair. The man is sitting on the footpath and the waitress hands him a coffee through the window. He takes it but seems unable to move once he’s holding it, like the weight of the coffee is completely too much for him .The waitress has to run around to the outside, take it from him and place it on his table. He’s shaking by the time he gets there.

My days are lazy and sunny and without shoes for most of the time.

Today, waking back from King Street, I noticed an ambulance across from the park and realised that I could hear a chopper. Two women stood at the entrance watching a helicopter hover just feet above the grass. Me: “What’s going on?” Them: shrugs. The woman from the church, watching too, pulled her dog out of the way of the supplementary ambulance man on a motor bike.

The painter rang the doorbell twice. We affixed the doorknob. We chatted. About the opening night. The free drinks. The leak. His paintings. I didn’t tell him any secrets. He got no secrets from me. I have no secrets.