Quarter to nine, Seville, and the Metropol Parasol is casting its honeycomb shadow across the plaza like some enormous sleeping animal. The waffled wood ceiling above me, they call it Las Setas, the mushrooms, and this early nobody has decided yet whether that’s affectionate or not. A street cleaner works the far corner with a broom that sounds like waves. That’s the only sound, that and the occasional scooter deciding this is the moment to be somewhere else.
I’ve got a napkin and a pencil stub and a café con leche that gave up being hot about ten minutes ago. I don’t mind. There’s a rhythm to sketching something this size, you can’t get it all, so you stop trying. I do the curve of one strut, the gap of light underneath, a pigeon that won’t hold still and ends up looking more like a smudge with opinions. My camera sits on the table, unbothered. Some mornings it just wants to watch.
An old man walks through with a paper bag of churros, the smell hits before he does, sugar and hot oil, and it’s gone as fast as it came. Somewhere a shutter rolls up, metal on metal, a shop deciding to exist for the day. I think about how every city has this hour, the one before it puts its face on. Milan has it too, quieter, greyer. Sao Paulo never really has it, that city doesn’t believe in mornings the way Seville does.
A waiter comes to ask if I want the coffee replaced. I say no, I like it like this now, tepid, honest. He shrugs, the universal gesture for tourists and their strange loyalties. Fair enough.
The shadow keeps stretching. I keep not finishing the sketch. There’s a version of me that would call this wasted time. That version is somewhere else this morning, probably in a meeting, probably checking a phone under a table. I don’t envy her.
Saudade is a word for missing something while you still have it, and I think that’s what this is, sitting here already nostalgic for a coffee I haven’t finished, a sketch I’ll never complete, a city that hasn’t fully woken up yet. Why rush it. The parasol isn’t going anywhere. Neither, for once, am I.
