Six thirty and the rooftop belongs to no one yet. Marrakech hasn’t decided if it’s awake. Below, a single scooter, then a rooster who clearly didn’t get the memo about which century this is. I sit at the edge where the tile is cool through my trousers and wait for the sun to figure out what it’s doing.
The msemen arrives folded like a letter nobody’s opened yet. Torn by hand, because that’s the only correct way. Argan oil pools in the creases and catches the light, gold doing what gold does, showing off without meaning to. I eat with my fingers. Somewhere London-me is horrified. Somewhere else, the version of me that’s actually here doesn’t care.
The tea comes from a height that looks theatrical and isn’t. Function, not performance. It aerates, the boy tells me, though I suspect he’s said this exact sentence to forty tourists this week and means it every time. Mint and too much sugar, the kind of sweet that argues with you and wins. I hold the glass with two fingers because it’s hot enough to remind me it exists.
*Terraço.* The word arrives in Portuguese before the Arabic name for this place even registers, my mother’s language showing up uninvited, the way it does. Every rooftop here works like this, a small private chapel with a view of someone else’s laundry. Satellite dishes instead of stained glass. A cat asleep on a ledge like it owns the deed.
I bring the camera up once. Don’t shoot. Some mornings ask to be looked at, not kept. The light moves across the oil, across the steam off the tea, across a stork somewhere doing slow laps over the medina like it’s been hired to patrol the sky. I let it pass through the frame and stay empty.
A muezzin starts up two streets over, then another answers from further off, the two calls overlapping without quite matching, a rough harmony that has no interest in being tidy. Below that: hammering, a cart, someone laughing too loudly for the hour. Up here, none of it is loud. Distance does that. Makes noise into texture.
I finish the tea slower than I mean to. The oil dish is empty, the bread gone, the sun now fully committed to the day. Someone asks if I want more. I say no, though what I mean is: not yet, I’m still eating the quiet.
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