The riad finds you before you find it. Down an alley too narrow for cars, past a door that looks like every other door, then through it and the city just stops. No scooters. No calls to prayer competing with traffic. Just water somewhere, trickling into a tiled fountain, patient, like it has nowhere else to be.
I count four candles on the table before dinner arrives. The mosaic underneath them catches the light and throws it back gold and green, a pattern someone spent months laying by hand, tile by tile, for a room that seats maybe ten people a night. Nobody rushes here. The waiter moves like he’s the one on holiday. Tajine comes covered, and when he lifts the lid the steam carries cumin and preserved lemon and something sweeter, dates maybe, and the lamb gives up before the fork even asks it to.
*Saudade* is a word my mother uses for missing something you haven’t lost yet. I think of it here, watching the candle wax pool on the tablecloth. This dinner will end. The mint tea, poured from a height that seems unnecessary until you taste it, too sweet, too hot, exactly right, will be finished. And I will already miss the sound of it being poured.
My camera stays in the bag most of the night. It sits there like it understands. There are rooms that ask to be photographed, all clean lines and good light, begging for proof. This isn’t one of them. What would the picture show anyway? Tile. Steam. A woman eating alone and not minding it. The important part, the stillness, doesn’t develop.
Somewhere past midnight a cat crosses the courtyard, unbothered, the way cats are everywhere in this city, like they own the deeds. The candles burn lower. Someone in the kitchen is laughing at something I’ll never know the punchline to. I sit until the tea goes cold and think about how some evenings don’t need a caption. They just need you to stay in the chair a little longer than planned.
I pay. I thank them in the little Arabic I’ve collected like coins in a pocket. I walk back through the same narrow alley, same wrong door that turns out right, and the city starts up again around me, unbothered by what just happened in that courtyard. As if it happens every night. Maybe it does. Maybe that’s the whole point of a place like this.
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