The glass is warm where the sun hits it. I hold the tea anyway, both hands, the way the waiter showed me on my first week here, before I knew the difference between polite and ceremony. Mint leaves stick to the bottom. Sugar thick enough to coat a spoon and leave it standing. I have had four of these today. This is not about the tea.
Café is loud in the way airports are loud everywhere: rolling suitcase wheels, a toddler negotiating with his mother in French, an announcement in Arabic that nobody looks up for. Then Milan flashes on the board and something in my chest does a small, private thing. Not sadness. Recognition, maybe. *Saudade* for a place I have not left yet.
I think about the medina this morning, how the light came down through the gaps in the souk roof in long yellow blades, dust turning in them like something alive. A man sold me oranges without weighing them, just handed them over, said this is enough, you decide the price. I gave him more than he asked. He laughed like I had told a joke badly. My camera caught none of it properly, the light was wrong, too much contrast, but I do not mind. Some things are for the eye only. The 35mm is patient about this. It does not complain when I keep it in the bag.
Casablanca gave me tannery smell and the call to prayer at odd hours and a rooftop where an old man played oud badly and beautifully at the same time. It gave me mint tea four times a day and a hotel room with a door that never quite closed and I liked it for that, a little imperfection, a little air getting in.
Now the board flickers again. Gate assignment. The tea is gone, just the wet leaves left, green against white porcelain. Milan waits on the other end of this, my father’s city, a different light, a different tempo, cappuccino instead of *na’na*, and somehow I am ready for both, or maybe ready for neither, just moving because that is the shape my life has taken.
Some doors you walk through twice. This one, I think, three or four times more before I am done. The board flickers. I pick up the duffel. It is heavier with oranges I should not have bought, and lighter, somehow, than when I arrived.
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