The rooftop belongs to a cat and me. Also to a teapot going lukewarm between my hands. The city below starts blue, then bluer, the walls holding onto the last light like they’re not ready to let go either. Chefchaouen at dusk is a rumor that turns out to be true.
I climbed up here before sunset with no plan except to watch. The Rif mountains sit at the edge of everything, patient, the kind of backdrop that makes you feel briefly unimportant in a good way. Someone below is frying something in cumin and oil. Smoke and mint and diesel from a scooter that passed twenty minutes ago and still hasn’t left the air. A door creaks somewhere. A child says something sharp in Darija and another child laughs.
Then the call to prayer starts, and it comes from four directions at once, slightly out of sync, and the whole valley fills up with it. I stop mid-sip. The cat doesn’t move. There’s a version of me, the London one, camera-school one, who would’ve reached for the Nikon fast, tried to catch the exact second the walls go from sky blue to something closer to ink. Tonight I let the 35mm sit in my lap. Some things you photograph. Some things you just let happen to you.
Saudade is a word my mother uses for missing something while you’re still standing in it. I understand it better here than I ever did in Sao Paulo. The tea’s gone cold, and I drink it anyway, because sending it back feels rude to the moment. A man on the next roof over nods at me like we’re sharing a secret. Maybe we are. Maybe the secret is just that the town is doing this whether we watch or not, every evening, indifferent to anyone’s schedule.
By the time the last call fades, the blue has gone all the way to navy, streetlights blinking on in the medina like someone’s lighting candles one by one. I think about how many rooftops I’ve sat on this year, how many teas gone cold, and how none of them felt like a waste. Isn’t that the whole trade? You give up the itinerary, you get the hour instead.
I stay until the cold in the cup matches the cold in the air. Then I go down the narrow stairs, one hand on the wall, blue on my fingertips that isn’t really there.
