The port at Essaouira smells like diesel and salt and something charring, which turns out to be dinner. Blue boats stacked three deep against the wall, paint peeling in a way that photographs better than it should. I sit at a plastic table that wobbles on the cobblestone. Nobody fixes it. Nobody seems to mind.
The sardines arrive on a tin plate, still ticking with heat, skin split and blistered from the grill. A woman fans the coals a few meters away, scarf knotted at her neck, unbothered by the smoke that keeps changing direction and choosing me. The camera stays in the bag for once. Some smells you can’t shoot anyway.
Bread comes whole, torn by hand, no knife in sight. You mop up the oil with it, the lemon, the little char flecks that fall off the fish. My fingers smell like the sea for the rest of the night and I don’t wash it off right away. The beer is cold in that specific way that only works in heat, condensation running down and pooling on the table’s one flat spot.
Outside the window, or what passes for one, the boats rock against each other. A slow, wooden knock. Like the harbor breathing, if you want to be poetic about it. I don’t, usually, but the light is doing something unfair to the water and the gulls are arguing over someone else’s scraps and it’s hard not to notice.
An old man at the next table eats the same meal, alone, methodical, bones set aside in a neat little pile like he’s done this ten thousand times. Maybe he has. He nods at me once. I nod back. That’s the whole conversation and it’s enough.
Saudade is a word for missing something while you’re still in it, and that’s roughly what this is. I know I’ll be somewhere else in three days, eating something else, and some part of me is already homesick for this exact plate, this exact wobble in the table, this exact smoke in my eyes.
The gulls get louder as the sun drops. The boats keep knocking. Someone laughs from the next dock over. I order another beer I don’t need, mostly to stay a little longer.
Who needs more than a tin plate, a torn piece of bread, and a harbor that won’t stop moving.
