The rooftop finds you before you find it. Three flights of narrow stairs, a boy pointing upward without looking up from his phone, and then this. Djemaa el-Fna spread out below like something still deciding what it wants to be. Smoke rising in thin columns from the food stalls, grilling something I can smell but can’t name. Cumin, maybe. Burnt sugar. The whole square breathing at once.
The drums start before I notice them starting. That’s how it works here, I think. Sound arrives sideways. A circle forms around a man singing off-key, and it is the most beautiful off-key I have heard, all conviction and no apology. Nobody in the circle seems to be watching for a phone. They are just watching. I take a note of that. *Saudade* for a place I haven’t even left yet.
My tea goes cold on the ledge beside me. Mint leaves settled at the bottom like they gave up trying to float. I keep meaning to drink it and keep not drinking it, because the light is doing something to the minarets I don’t want to miss. Gold first, then a kind of rust, then nothing, the sky just deciding to be done with the day. Somewhere below a scooter cuts through the crowd and nobody scatters, they just fold around it like water.
I have the camera on my lap the whole time. I almost forget it’s there, which is rare. Usually it’s the first thing I reach for. Tonight I just watch. Storks somewhere behind me, unbothered by any of it, doing their evening rounds along the rooftops like this is any Tuesday. For them it probably is.
Someone at the next table asks if I’ve been to Marrakech before. I say no. She says it changes you a little. I don’t argue, though I’ve heard that about a lot of places and I’m starting to think it’s the evenings that change you, not the cities. The particular slant of a particular sunset, the way sound carries when the heat finally lets go.
By the time I remember the tea it’s gone cold enough that I just leave it. The square is still singing below. I stay until the gold is long gone and the drums have turned into something quieter, and even then I don’t quite want to go down and rejoin it. Some views you keep from a distance on purpose.
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