Gate opens at eight. I am the third person in.
The blue hits before anything else does. Cobalt, thick, almost wet looking, the kind of color that makes you check if it’s real paint or some trick of the light. It shouldn’t exist this early, this loud, before the mint tea has even cooled anywhere in the city. The walls hold it like they’re proud of it. Maybe they are.
Bamboo overhead, thin and rattling in a breeze I can’t otherwise feel. Water moving somewhere I can’t see. A gardener works near the cactus beds, unhurried, and doesn’t look up once. Not at me, not at the two other early risers drifting through with their phones out. He already knows what this place looks like at nine, at noon, at five. He has seen the crowds arrive like weather. There’s a kind of peace in that, in being unimpressed by beauty because you live inside it every day.
I sit on a bench the color of the walls and let my camera hang. Not ready yet. Some mornings you photograph first and feel later. This one I wanted backwards. The air smells like wet stone and something green I can’t name, maybe the palms, maybe just Marrakech deciding to smell like itself. Somewhere past the wall a moped starts, stops, starts again. The city waking up on the other side of all this quiet.
I think of Yves Saint Laurent walking these same paths, deciding blue wasn’t blue enough until it was this. Vanity, maybe. Or just knowing exactly what you want and refusing to apologize for it. I respect that more the older I get.
By the time I lift the camera, the light has shifted just slightly, gone from flat to angled, throwing a shadow of palm leaves across the nearest wall like a second, temporary mural. I take one frame. Just one. Some places don’t need twelve.
A tour group arrives at nine fifteen, loud with relief at having found the entrance, and the gardener still hasn’t looked up. Cabo I think, though I’ve never been able to place his accent. I leave before the hush breaks completely. Better to keep the morning whole in memory than watch it get crowded out in real time.
Outside, the medina is already too warm. I don’t mind. *Saudade* for a place I only just left, isn’t that its own kind of souvenir.
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