The stairs up to the medina are steep and blue, and by the time I find the restaurant my legs have forgotten what flat ground feels like. Blue on the walls, blue on the doorframes, blue even on the cat that watches me from a windowsill, or maybe that’s just the light. A boy leads me to a rooftop table with a cloth the color of saffron and pulls out my chair like he’s done this a thousand times. He probably has.
The bread arrives first, torn not cut, still warm enough to fog the air above it. I eat it plain before anything else comes, because some things don’t need help. Then the tagine, lamb with something sweet hiding in it, prunes maybe, and a waiter who won’t tell me the recipe no matter how I ask. *Segredo*, he says, and smiles like that settles it. Fair enough. Not everything needs an answer.
The lanterns here don’t just light the room, they do the talking the conversation forgets to have. Punched tin, throwing little stars across the tablecloth, across my hands, across the camera I’ve set down and haven’t touched in an hour. It sits there, patient, the way it always is when the moment is better left alone. I think of Milan for a second, some overlit restaurant with music too loud to hear the person across from you. Here the only sound is a call to prayer drifting in from somewhere below, and cutlery, and a woman laughing two tables over at a joke I’ll never understand.
Someone asks me later how long I stayed in that spot. I have no real answer. Long enough for the mint tea to go cold and get poured again. Long enough to stop checking anything with a battery. Cumin, saffron, the scrape of a chair, a dog barking twice then giving up. Chefchaouen doesn’t rush you toward dessert or the check or the next plan. It just lets you sit in the blue and the low light and be, for once, exactly where you are.
I leave with bread crumbs on my sleeve and no idea what time it is. Somewhere below, the medina keeps humming to itself, indifferent, blue, unbothered by whether I noticed. I noticed.
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