Six in the morning and Chefchaouen is still deciding what color to be. Blue, obviously. But which blue. The walls shift depending on where the sun sits, cobalt in the shade, almost white where the light lands directly on it. I sit on a step that isn’t mine, camera on my knee, and just watch the decision happen.
A cat crosses the alley like it owns the deed to the building. Somewhere above me, someone shakes a rug off a balcony, and the dust hangs there a second before it remembers gravity. The air smells like bread and wet stone. A fountain runs nearby, not loud, just present, the kind of sound you stop noticing until it stops. Even that sounds blue somehow, if sound can have a color. Ask me again after a coffee and I might disagree with myself.
A family crosses the square. The youngest one waves at no one in particular, maybe at the whole morning, maybe at me, maybe at nobody at all, and her mother doesn’t even look back to check. There’s a trust in that. Nobody here is in a hurry to arrive anywhere. I think of Sao Paulo, the traffic, the way everyone there walks like they’re late for something even on a Sunday. Here the pace is the opposite argument. Devagar. Slow, on purpose.
I don’t take the photo right away. The Leica sits there, patient, the way it always is, waiting for me to stop being a tourist about it and just look first. Eventually I do take it, one frame, because some mornings don’t need more than one. The rest I keep for myself, unprinted, which might be the more honest kind of photograph anyway.
By eight the square starts filling in. A shop pulls up its shutter, metal complaining the whole way. Someone starts sweeping the same three meters of stone they probably sweep every single day, and there’s something steady in that, something I don’t have, moving the way I do, city to city, no address to sweep in front of.
Chefchaouen doesn’t perform for you. It just sits there, blue, and lets you catch up to it. I sat still for an hour and didn’t take a single note. Some places you don’t need to write down. You just remember the color.
