Gràcia wakes up slowly, if it wakes up at all. The plaza outside my window is still half asleep at nine, shutters going up one by one like eyelids that resent the light. I take the corner table at the café that has no sign, only a faded awning the color of an old tomato. The owner knows my order now. This is either a compliment or a warning.
The coffee arrives too hot to drink and I let it sit, the way you let a good sentence sit before you read it again. Someone’s grandmother is sweeping the same three tiles she has swept every morning for forty years, judging by the wear in the stone. A pigeon negotiates with a crust of bread. The cat, an orange, unbothered thing that belongs to no one and everyone, has claimed my foot as government property and gone still.
I open the newspaper I cannot fully read. My Spanish is a cousin of my Portuguese, close enough to guess, far enough to get the headlines wrong in interesting ways. The pages are warm, sun-soaked, and they smell faintly of ink and someone else’s cigarette from the rack. I do not need the news. I need the warmth of it against my hands, which is its own kind of information.
My camera sits on the table, unused, patient. Some mornings it wants to work. This one it just wants coffee too, apparently. There is a version of me, a few years younger, who would have felt guilty for this, for sitting still while a city is out there doing whatever cities do. That version rushed through Rome once and remembers none of it. I remember Gràcia instead: the exact angle the light hits the wall across the street, gold sliding down like it’s in no hurry either, the church bell two streets over that rings four minutes late every single day, reliably wrong.
*Che meraviglia*, my father would say, for something this small. He was right, mostly about the wrong things.
The cat stretches, resettles, does not leave. Neither do I. Someone asks if the other chair is free and I say yes, though we both know I am hoping they won’t take it. They don’t. The coffee finally cools to drinkable. I let it wait a little longer anyway.
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