Gate 14. The coffee gave up being hot twenty minutes ago and I gave up minding. There is a particular quality to airport light in the morning, flat and honest, the kind that shows you every scuff on the floor and every yawn on every face and does not apologize for it. Someone is asleep across the row, jacket as a blanket. A child is negotiating with her mother about a churro. The intercom clears its throat every few minutes and says nothing important.
My boarding pass says Seville. My body has not caught up. Porto has a way of holding onto you a little past checkout, past security, past the gate itself, the way a song stays in a room after someone turns off the radio. I can still smell the river this morning, that mineral, sleepy smell, and the bakery two streets from where I stayed, cinnamon and diesel in equal measure. Funny how a city packs itself into your coat pocket like that and rides along uninvited.
I take the camera out, more out of habit than intention. It sits heavier than a phone, colder too, and there is comfort in that weight. I do not shoot much. One frame of the window, the tarmac blurred gold behind the glass, a plane’s wing catching the light like a knife catching a candle. Some mornings the camera works. Some mornings it just wants to be held. This is one of the holding mornings.
*Saudade* is a word people love to translate badly. Longing, they say, or nostalgia, close enough to miss the point entirely. It is closer to this: sitting in a plastic chair in Terminal 2, coffee cold, one city already turning to memory while another waits at the far end of a two hour flight, and feeling both of them at once, neither one all the way real yet. Is that sadness? I do not think so. It might just be what it costs to move often. A small toll paid at every gate.
They call my flight. I finish the coffee anyway, out of spite, out of ritual, I am not sure which. The light through the glass has not changed its mind about anything. Seville will have its own kind of morning waiting, sharper maybe, hotter certainly. For now I am nowhere properly, gate 14, half in Porto, half already gone, and the window keeps doing what windows do best. Showing me everything and asking nothing back.
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