I heard people on the street, eruptions of laughter and someone who sounded like Marnie asking someone I couldn’t see whose house they were going to and demanding a stop for snacks, and then a motorbike drowning them out before I found out if she got her way. And then someone else, something else. A car. A deep booming laugh. Sometimes I hated it—on Friday and Saturday nights when it was all drunken hipsters and engineering students yelling ugly slurs at cab drivers who wouldn’t take them home and women who wouldn’t go with them—but tonight it was comforting, distracting.

Lina didn’t know how I slept with all the noise. When I’d first moved in, she’d startled at every passing truck, at every drunken holler, every siren, and at some point I’d stopped inviting her round, let her off the hook.

She didn’t know how I slept with all the noise. I didn’t know how she slept without it.

I dropped my last cigarette butt into the old wine bottle I kept wedged in the top of the awning, listening for the hiss as it hit the dregs and went out.

Once I’d closed the window, checked the ashtrays and the locks and the stove again, I sat down on my bed and reached for the shoebox nestled against the wall, opening it and pushing aside a pile of superficially important papers—uni transcripts, tax papers, a copy of my birth certificate—to uncover a stack of postcards.

The top one was from Canberra, a twilight panorama with the tower it was taken from pasted over the top. We’d gone there on a school trip in year six, and I’d taken a photo of the exact same view, but this wasn’t from there; it was from an op shop somewhere, years ago. I had a vague memory of choosing it over a purple carpet of jacaranda flowers from Grafton.

I picked up the pile and flicked through it until I found the one I was looking for. Central Park. New York. I had no idea how it had ended up in a Lifeline shop in Hornsby eleven years ago, unmarked and with a hole punched through one corner, but it had, and for twenty cents it was mine. The lines were too crisp, the greens were too green and the blues too blue, as though someone had just figured out how to adjust the saturation and contrast. Still, it made my ribs tighten.

I turned it over. Blank. All the ones at the top were blank. I’d been saving them, until I wasn’t saving them anymore. I was just burying them.

Under New York, Amsterdam. When I turned that one over words swam across the cardboard, almost diagonal, handwriting I knew better than my own.

Dear Caitlin,

Okay, I’ll bite. Just this once. Weirdo.