Six in the morning and Meia Praia has no opinion of me yet. That comes later, with the day crowd, the paddle boards, the man renting umbrellas he never quite plants straight. For now it is just sand, and me, and the Nikon around my neck like a patient dog waiting to be let off the leash.
I leave my shoes by a rock I will probably not find again. The sand is cold in that specific way, damp cold, not winter cold. It holds the shape of my heel for a second, two, three. Someone walked here before me and the tide erased them already. Fair enough. That’s the deal you make with a beach at dawn: it forgets you almost as fast as it meets you.
The light comes in sideways, over the cliffs at the far end, the ones that look chewed by something patient and enormous. Gulls arguing about nothing. The Atlantic smells different here than it does in Portugal’s north, saltier somehow, or maybe that’s just me wanting it to be. My father used to say the sea in Liguria was sweeter than any other. Everyone’s sea is the sweetest one. Saudade works like that too, claims things that were never fully yours.
I load the camera slow, hands still stiff from sleep. One frame of my own footprints, walking away from where I’m standing, which makes no sense until you remember film doesn’t care about logic, only light. One frame of the cliffs doing their slow orange thing. One frame of nothing, really, just water meeting more water, because sometimes the plainest shot is the one you go back to in November when everything else feels like decoration.
A fisherman passes with a bucket and does not look at me twice. Good. I don’t want to be interesting right now. I want to be barefoot and cold-footed and mildly hungry, thinking about coffee I haven’t earned yet.
Here’s the thing about sand: it keeps you for eight seconds, tops, then moves on, easy, no hard feelings. The camera is stubborn in comparison. It holds on to this exact slant of light until someone, maybe me, maybe a stranger scrolling long after I’m gone, decides to look again. So who’s the better witness, the beach or the box of glass and metal around my neck?
I don’t answer that. I just keep walking, leaving marks that don’t last, collecting a few that will.
