Six in the morning and Cascais is still deciding whether to wake up. I am not deciding anything. I am just here, duffel dumped by the door of a rental that still smells like someone else’s coffee, camera around my neck because it sleeps better than I do.
The seafront is empty except for a man fishing off the rocks and a dog that has clearly negotiated its own freedom from its owner. The tide left everything wet and the promenade holds onto the night’s cold like it is not ready to let go either. Copper light comes in low over the water, catching the wet stone and turning it into something almost molten. Salt in the air, thick enough to taste. Underneath it, something fried from a café that has not opened yet but is already awake, already working. Bom dia, the smell says, before anyone actually does.
I sit on the wall for a while. The Atlantic does its thing, the same thing it has done every dawn before I existed and will keep doing after. There is a rhythm to it that has nothing to do with me, waves arriving unbothered by whether anyone is watching. I think about a beach in Sao Paulo, Guarujá maybe, my mother’s hand pulling me back from water that always seemed bigger than the rules she gave me. The ocean here is colder, quieter, but it has the same disregard. Water rarely cares about your schedule. It has been keeping its own for longer than we have had clocks.
The camera does its usual work, patient, unbothered by the early hour, waiting for me to stop thinking and just press the shutter. Wet stone, gull tracks, a shutter clicking somewhere behind me that is not mine, an actual window shutter, opening. Someone else deciding the day can start now.
By the time the fisherman reels in something small and silver, the light has shifted from copper to something more ordinary, more like morning proper. The magic window closes fast here. Ten minutes, maybe less, before Cascais turns into a place with tourists and traffic and normal decisions to make.
I walk back slower than I came. No rush now. The stone is drying under my boots, losing that dark, wet shine it had an hour ago. Saudade for a moment I am still standing inside of. Is that possible? Missing something before it is even gone. Cascais seems to think so.
