Five fifty-five and the grove is emptying out. The tour groups leave on schedule, like tide pulling back, and what's left is this: stalks the color of old bottle glass, pressing up so high the sky becomes a rumor. I stand in the middle of the path and listen. Bamboo doesn't sound like wood. It creaks, knocks, settles, the way a house does at night when it thinks no one's home.
The light comes down in pieces. Not beams, more like someone dropping coins through a grate. It lands on the gravel, on my boots, on nothing in particular, and moves while I watch it, because the wind up there is doing something the wind down here isn't. I load another roll. The Leica is patient with me, has always been patient with me, even in Lisbon stairwells and São Paulo traffic. Here it just waits. There isn't much to say to a bamboo grove except thank you, and even that feels loud.
I think about scale. How a stalk this thin holds itself this tall, how it bends in storms instead of snapping, how the whole grove moves together like it rehearsed. My father used to say bamboo is humble on purpose, that it knows something about bending we don't. I didn't understand him in Milan. I understand him a little better standing here, alone, dusk settling into the green like it's been invited.
No one else in frame. That's not an accident, that's the hour. Come before five and it's a thoroughfare. Come now and it's a held breath. I don't move for a while. The path goes on without me needing to finish it, which feels like the whole point of being here, the whole point of anywhere, maybe. Saudade for a place I haven't left yet, isn't that strange? The light keeps fading. I let it.
