Five thirty and the ramparts are empty except for me, a fisherman coiling rope somewhere below, and a cat who owns this wall more than anyone. The stone is cold under my hand. Centuries of salt air have eaten at the edges of these battlements, softened them, the way the Atlantic softens everything it touches long enough.
The wind arrives before the sun does. It comes off the water with nothing to stop it, no hills, no buildings tall enough to argue. It moves through the old cannons lined up along the wall, whistles low in their mouths like the city is breathing through iron teeth. My scarf goes first. Then a page of my notebook, gone before I can grab it, cartwheeling off toward Skala and whoever finds it will have half a grocery list and a bad sketch of a gate. I let it go. Some things you chase. Some things you just watch leave.
Below, the medina is still asleep but the sea isn’t. It never is. Waves work the base of the walls the same rhythm they’ve kept since the Portuguese built this place for reasons that made sense to no one but themselves. Salt in the air, and something else underneath it, tar maybe, or the fish stalls not yet open but already promising themselves. Gulls start up before the light does, arguing over nothing, the way gulls do everywhere from here to Lisbon.
I load the Leica by feel, cold metal, familiar click. The light when it comes is not gold, not yet, it’s grey turning blue turning something without a name, the kind of light that makes you understand why painters chase mornings instead of afternoons. I take one frame of the empty wall, one of the cannon with the sea behind it, one I don’t remember taking at all. The camera doesn’t care about the wind. It just waits, the way it always does, for me to stop being distracted and point it somewhere honest.
*Saudade* is a word for missing something that hasn’t left yet. Standing here, coat pulled tight, hair doing whatever it wants, I think that’s the feeling. Not homesick. Just aware that this exact version of the morning will not happen again. The wind doesn’t ask permission up here. Neither does time, really. You just learn to stand still long enough to notice both taking what they want.
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