Six in the morning and I’m the only tourist. Or the only one awake enough to matter. The guard let me up early, some arrangement I don’t fully remember making, and now I’m alone with the dragon’s back and a sky that hasn’t decided what color it wants to be yet.
The tiles catch the first light before anything else does. Blue, green, that broken-glass shimmer Gaudí loved, trencadís, they call it, and each piece holds a different degree of dawn. I sit on the cool stone. It hasn’t warmed yet. My hands remember this from somewhere, some other rooftop, some other city that also woke up slow and let me watch.
Barcelona below is doing its quiet thing. A shutter rolls up two streets over. A moped coughs to life, stalls, tries again. Someone’s coffee machine hisses through an open window and I can smell it from here, bitter and close, mixed with the salt coming off the sea I can’t see but know is there. The chimneys around me look like soldiers wearing helmets designed by someone who’d never seen a war, only imagined one, beautifully.
I load the camera without thinking. Some mornings you don’t compose, you just point and trust. The light does the negotiating. It always does. I take one frame of the rooftop curve against the paling sky, another of a pigeon that has clearly seen better dawns than this one and isn’t impressed by any of it. *Mesmo assim*, he stays for the shot.
There’s a version of me that would’ve slept through this. Younger, more tired, more convinced that rest mattered more than witness. She would’ve missed the exact minute the tiles stopped being just tiles and became something closer to water, catching color, letting it go. I don’t know when I traded her habits for these ones. Somewhere between Milan and here, probably. Somewhere in a train window or a departure gate.
The city fills in slowly beneath me, block by block, sound by sound. I stay until the light turns ordinary, until it becomes simply Tuesday morning in Barcelona and not this specific unrepeatable thing. Then I climb down, back into the noise, back into the day everyone else is just starting.
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