Letters from a slow city.

The city I have been writing to does not keep the same hours as the country around it. Its shops close for reasons never posted on the door. A letter takes four days to cross a distance my phone crosses instantly — and the four days, I have decided, are not a failure of the post. They are a position the city is taking.

I did not move here so much as fail to leave. I had come for a week, between two assignments, and the week took on the soft, expanding quality that time acquires when nothing is pulling against it. By the time I noticed, I had a chair I thought of as mine, in a café that did not, on principle, keep wifi.

What the clock is for

Elsewhere, the day is a container to be filled efficiently. Here it is closer to weather — something you move through, dress for, occasionally wait out. The distinction sounds quaint until you have lived inside it for a season, at which point it stops being quaint and starts being an argument. The city is not slow because it is backward. It is slow because it has decided, collectively and without ever holding a vote, what speed is for and what it costs.

Speed is for emergencies. That is the whole of the city’s theory, and it is hard to fault. When everything is urgent, the word urgent stops working, and you lose the one signal meant to tell you when to genuinely hurry. A city that rushes nothing keeps that alarm in working order.

The slowness of a reply

My letters home have grown slower to match. I used to apologise for the delay; now I think of the delay as part of the message — evidence that the letter was written by someone with time to write it, to someone assumed to have time to read. A fast reply says I saw this. A slow one says I considered it. The city taught me the difference, and I have stopped wanting to unlearn it.

So these are letters written to a place, and in its defence. If they arrive a little late, take that as the argument rather than an apology for it.