The climb is the toll you pay. Steep streets turning into steeper stairs, someone’s laundry drying above your head, a dog barking at nothing behind a gate. By the time the bunkers open up in front of you, legs burning, you understand why no one complains about the walk once they’re up there. Barcelona spreads out below like it’s been rehearsing this angle for a hundred years.
Someone has a speaker playing something low and forgettable. Someone else is teaching another person to roll a cigarette, badly. There’s a couple with a bottle of cava they clearly forgot a corkscrew for, working it with a house key and a lot of patience. The concrete is still warm from the day, and I sit on it anyway, jeans be damned. Below, the city starts doing the thing it does at this hour: rooftops going gold, then pink, then that blue that isn’t quite blue yet. Sagrada Família catches the last of the light like it knows it’s being watched. It usually does.
I pour wine into a plastic cup, the kind that bends when you hold it too tight. Someone’s abuela used to say the best views are the ones you can’t charge admission for. Mine did, anyway, in São Paulo, standing on her balcony pointing at nothing in particular. I think of her here, oddly. The Nikon sits in my lap. I don’t touch it for twenty minutes. This surprises me more than it should.
There’s a version of this evening where I’m crouched, adjusting exposure, chasing the exact second the light turns. Tonight I just watch it happen instead, no frame around it. Funny how the camera can make you present and absent at the same time. Tonight it stays quiet. Tonight it just watches too.
A group nearby cheers about something, maybe the sunset, maybe just being young in a city that photographs well. Below us, the streets are still doing their evening thing, scooters, shutters coming down, someone shouting a name that isn’t mine. Up here it’s just wind, cheap wine, and a skyline doing all the talking. *Que saudade*, I think, before it’s even over. Missing something while it’s still happening. That’s a very specific kind of ache.
Eventually the color drains out of the sky like someone pulled a plug. The city turns to lights instead of shapes. I finish the wine. I take exactly one photo. It won’t capture any of this, not really. I take it anyway.
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