Six in the morning and Essaouira is still deciding whether to wake up. I climb the stone steps to the ramparts alone, camera knocking against my hip, and the wind is already there waiting. It does not ask permission. It picks a direction and hands it to me, and I take it, because arguing with the Atlantic before coffee seems like a bad way to start a day.
The cannons line up along the wall, old and rusted and pointed at nothing now. Below them the blue boats sit in the harbor, that specific blue, somewhere between a robin’s egg and the sky before it commits to a color. They rock without going anywhere. I think about how much of travel is exactly this, movement that looks like stillness if you squint.
The smell here is salt and diesel and something frying already, even at this hour, someone’s breakfast or someone’s business. Gulls complain overhead, the kind of sound that never quite becomes music but you stop noticing after the first ten minutes. My hands are cold around the Leica. I take one frame, wait, take another. The light keeps shifting, soft gold sliding into something sharper, and Essaouira does not pause for anyone’s shutter speed.
An old man passes with a wheelbarrow of fish, nods at me like I am furniture that happens to be there every morning. Maybe I am. Maybe every place collects a version of you that stays behind after you leave, standing on some wall, pretending the wind isn’t cutting through your jacket. Saudade for a place I haven’t even left yet, is that possible? Ask me tomorrow.
I think of Milan, oddly, standing there. Nonna’s terrace, the wind off the Alps in winter, how she used to say the wind has opinions and you’re a fool to argue with them. She would have liked this. She would have told me to eat something before taking pictures of boats.
By the time the sun clears the wall properly, my fingers have gone from cold to numb to something resembling acceptance. The boats are still blue. The wind has not changed its mind. I climb down before the town fully wakes, before the medina starts its noise, keeping this hour for myself a little longer. Some mornings you don’t need to understand them. You just need to stand still long enough to let them happen to you.
