Six in the morning and the cliffs are already warm from yesterday. I sit with my legs over the edge, the stone rough against the backs of my knees, and somewhere below a pot of coffee I made too strong an hour ago goes cold in my hand. Lagos does this thing at dawn where the water turns the color of something you can’t quite name, not blue, not green. The swimmers down there look like commas and periods scattered across a page I haven’t written yet.
There’s a smell here of salt and something sweeter underneath, maybe the fig trees on the path behind me, maybe just the sun starting to work on the rock. Gulls make their usual complaints. Somewhere a boat engine coughs awake. I keep thinking about how quiet a cliff can be even with all of that. Silêncio, but a full one, not an empty one.
My camera sits beside me, lens cap off, patient. It has seen better light and worse coffee. I load a new roll and think of my father, who once told me the Algarve was where Portuguese men went to retire and forget their knees. He never came here himself. Funny, the places we inherit secondhand, through someone else’s stories, and then finally walk into ourselves. The cliffs don’t care whose memory brought me. They just keep doing what cliffs do, which is nothing, beautifully.
A woman jogs past on the path above, nods, keeps going. I envy her routine for exactly four seconds. Then I remember I have no routine to envy her back with, and that feels like its own kind of luck. The coffee is undrinkable now. I drink it anyway, because wasting anything up here seems rude to the view.
Down in the water, one swimmer breaks off from the rest, floats on her back, arms out like she’s trying to hold the whole morning in place. I understand the impulse. I take one frame, just one, because the light won’t hold this exact angle for long and neither will I. Then I put the camera down and just watch, which is its own kind of photograph, the kind that doesn’t develop anywhere but here. The cliff edge, the cooling cup, the small blue punctuation marks below, spelling out something I don’t need to translate.
