The souk swallows the map before I’ve even opened it. Every lane narrows into another lane, and every corner promises it’s the last one, then isn’t. Dusk does something to Marrakech I can’t explain in a caption. The light turns the color of the spices themselves, saffron and paprika bleeding into the walls until you can’t tell what’s dye and what’s sky.
In the Dyers Quarter the smell arrives first. Wet wool, something metallic underneath, and beneath that, mint from a tea glass someone left on a windowsill three shops back. Skeins of yarn hang overhead in reds and purples so deep they look wet even when they’re dry, dripping color into the air instead of the ground. A man stirs a vat with a wooden pole taller than he is, steam rising like the whole street is breathing. He doesn’t look up. Why would he? Tourists are just weather here, passing through.
My fingers turn orange from the spice stalls before I even reach the dyers, saffron dust settling into the creases of my hands like it’s decided to stay. A woman presses a ceramic bowl into them instead, small, unglazed, warm from the sun or from her own palms, I can’t tell which. It sits there like something alive. I don’t buy it. I don’t need to. Some things you hold just to remember the weight of them.
The camera stays around my neck longer than it usually does. Too dark for the meter to agree with me, too much happening to stop and argue with it. One frame, maybe. The steam, the hanging wool, a boy weaving between legs with a tray of tea glasses balanced like he’s done it since birth, which he probably has. *Menina*, my mother would’ve said, watching me get swallowed by an alley on purpose. Not lost. Just done needing the map.
Someone calls out a price for a scarf I never asked about. I shake my head, smiling, and somehow that’s the whole transaction, no scarf, no hard feelings. The lane bends again. A door I didn’t notice a minute ago is suddenly the only door there is. Dusk in the souk isn’t a time of day so much as a mood the whole quarter agrees to have together, and for an hour I just walk in it, orange fingers, warm bowl, no destination, no rush to find one.
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