Drifting North
Yesterday I drifted through the laneways of North Fitzroy, following whatever caught the corner of my eye; rusted corrugations slumping into themselves, ivy pushing hard against old timber, the way cobblestones hold light like they’re storing it for later. These alleys aren’t picturesque in any curated sense. They’re half‑forgotten service routes, stitched together by fences that have seen too many summers and too many tags.
What I kept noticing was the tension between collapse and persistence. Metal buckling but still standing. Brickwork patched and re-patched. Trees leaning over fences as if trying to reclaim the whole block. Every surface felt like a negotiation between time, weather, and whoever last bothered to fix something.
Walking there is like reading a book with missing pages; you get fragments, hints, the shape of a story without the full plot. And that’s enough. The laneways don’t perform. They just exist, quietly, stubbornly, in the gaps between the city’s more polished narratives.
I’ll go back. Places like this reward slow looking. They change in small ways, and that’s the kind of change I enjoy.
