The stairs up are uneven, worn smooth by eight centuries of feet that had better reasons than mine. I take them slow anyway. That is the whole point.
The Moorish Castle sits above Sintra like it forgot to fall down. Grey stone, green moss in the cracks, a lizard doing push ups on the ramparts like he owns the place. Maybe he does. Fog moves through the pines below, thick enough that the town disappears and reappears, a magic trick nobody is performing on purpose. Somewhere past all that, the Atlantic. I cannot see it. I can feel it, though, in the wind that never stops arguing with itself.
I put my hand flat on the wall. Cold. Rougher than it looks. A Moorish soldier stood watch here once, bored out of his mind probably, scanning the same horizon for ships that weren’t coming. I think about him more than I think about the view. Funny how ruins do that, hand you someone else’s ordinary day instead of a postcard.
My camera hangs heavy against my hip, patient as always. I load a new roll sitting on a low stone step, hands a little cold, fingers slow with the film. She does not mind waiting. Thirty five millimeters of nothing, waiting to become something. I shoot one frame of the fog swallowing a watchtower, one of a woman in a red coat looking the wrong way at exactly the right moment. She will never know she is in it. Neither will I, until the roll comes back from wherever film goes to be believed in again.
Saudade is a word my mother used for missing something that is still right in front of you. Standing on this wall, watching centuries of weather erase and rebuild the same stones, I understand it better than any dictionary could explain it. The castle is not sad. It is just old enough to know that everything passes through, wind, empires, tourists, fog. It stays. That is its whole job.
An old man walks past with a cane and a small dog, nods at me like we share a secret. Do we? Maybe the secret is just this: nobody up here is in a hurry. The wind keeps talking. I still don’t understand it. I let it go on anyway, and take the long way back down.
