Five thirty and the medina is still asleep, except for me and the cats. They have this figured out long before the tourists arrive with their matching outfits and their selfie sticks. I climb the stairs above the tannery smell, past doors painted so many shades of blue that someone must have run out of names for them. Cerulean. Cobalt. The blue of a bruise, three days old. My father would call this too much of a good thing. My mother would already be taking photos with her phone, no patience for film, no patience for waiting.
I have both their patience problems and neither of their solutions. So I wait. The light comes in sideways first, catching the walls at an angle that makes every alley look like it was built specifically for this hour. Someone is sweeping a doorstep two streets over, the sound of straw on stone traveling further than it should in this quiet. A rooster, unconvincing, tries twice before giving up.
The cat on the ledge does not move for me. Why would she. She has seen a thousand women with cameras stand exactly where I am standing, and she has outlasted all of them. Her tail curls once, a slow punctuation mark, and she keeps watching the street below like she is expecting someone more interesting. I load another frame. The shutter sounds too loud for how empty everything is, but the cat does not flinch. She has heard louder.
There’s a particular kind of cold here before the sun clears the hills, the kind that gets into cotton and stays there. I sit on a step, duffel between my knees, and let the blue do what it does, which is make you forget you were ever in a hurry. *Calma*. The word my grandmother used for everything from grief to bad traffic. It fits here too.
By seven the shopkeepers start appearing, pulling shutters, calling to each other in words I only half catch. The spell breaks slowly, not all at once. I finish the roll before the crowds do. Twenty four dreams of blue, unlabeled, waiting for me to find a place with the right chemicals. Chefchaouen doesn’t ask you to understand it. It just asks you to notice. The cat, for her part, has already lost interest in me and gone back to owning the view.
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