Six thirty and the Albaicín is still deciding whether to wake up. I climb the narrow street before the tourist buses arrive, past whitewashed walls that smell faintly of last night’s rain, and find the same table I found yesterday. Same chair. Same tilt of light. The waiter doesn’t ask what I want anymore. He just brings it.
The Alhambra sits across the valley like it has somewhere better to be and isn’t going. Red stone catching the first sun, the Sierra Nevada still holding snow behind it like an afterthought. Somewhere a bell rings, uneven, more suggestion than schedule. A woman below beats a rug against her balcony rail, three sharp cracks, then nothing. Doves scatter and resettle on a wire like they’ve done this every morning of their lives, which they have.
I take one photo. Just one. The 35mm doesn’t forgive wasted frames, and some mornings don’t need forty attempts to prove they happened. Click. Done. The rest I keep for myself, unphotographed, the way my avó used to say some things belong only to the person standing there. She never explained what she meant. I understand it a little more each year.
The café con leche arrives too hot to drink and I let it cool past the point of pleasure, past the point most people would call it ruined. Ruined for what, though? I’m not in a hurry. Nobody’s waiting on the other side of this cup. Steam lifts off it in a thin line, bends left, disappears. The Alhambra doesn’t blink. Neither do I, not really, just the long slow kind of looking that has no destination attached to it.
An old man two tables over reads a newspaper he clearly already finished, folding and unfolding it out of habit more than curiosity. A cat threads itself around table legs, uninterested in me, deeply interested in the pastry crumbs from the table I’m not sitting at. Somewhere behind me a door creaks open, shuts, the particular sound of a neighborhood that has had the same doors for five hundred years and sees no reason to replace them now.
The coffee goes properly cold. I drink it anyway. Bitter, flat, a little wrong, entirely fine. Some mornings the view is the meal and the coffee is just something to hold onto so your hands have a job while your eyes do the real work.
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