Lagos at six in the evening, and the walls do that thing again. White to gold, no transition you can point to, just a shift you notice after it’s already happened. I’m on Rua da Barroca, or maybe the next one over. The streets here rename themselves depending on your mood.
Someone’s grandmother is arguing with a cat two balconies up. The cat is winning. A man sells roasted chestnuts from a cart that’s seen better decades, and the smoke drifts into the wine I’m holding, cheap and red and served in a paper cup because the bar ran out of glasses an hour ago and nobody seemed bothered. Saudade is a word I grew up hearing my mother use for everything from a lost earring to a dead relative. Lagos makes it physical. You can drink it, apparently.
The Nikon hangs against my hip, patient. I haven’t lifted it in twenty minutes. Some evenings the light is doing the photographing for me and my job is just to stand there and receive it. There’s a church at the end of the alley, half in shadow, half lit like it’s showing off. I think about my father, who would’ve had something to say about Baroque restraint, or the lack of it, and I let the thought pass through without following it anywhere.
Old men on folding chairs outside a tabacaria, dominoes clicking, not looking up when I pass. A dog asleep in a doorway that isn’t his. The cobblestones here are uneven in a way that makes you walk slower whether you want to or not, which I’ve decided is the whole point of the town. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t perform. It just turns gold at the same hour every day and waits to see who’s paying attention.
I finish the wine somewhere near the old customs house, facing the water, the boats knocking against each other like they’re having a quiet conversation I’m not invited to. A woman next to me is also alone, also not in a hurry. We don’t speak. We don’t need to. The dusk does most of the talking in this town, and everyone just nods along.
By the time I make it back to the room, my shirt smells like woodsmoke and citrus peel and my camera’s still full, unused, twenty-six frames left. Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight was for looking, not keeping.
