Timezones & Transfers

Part I

Calayo & Muna

“I thought us meeting was gonna be more, weird, and it’s not weird.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah… I was maybe a little nervous. Not gonna lie. Not gonna lie, but nah, I knew it was, I knew it was gonna be cool.”
“We know so many of the same of people, like people in common.”
“Right? How could it not work?”
“It is working?”
“Eeee… Ja. Ja it’s working. I know you talked to some of our friends about ‘this’, and me.”
“Ha ha. Who told you?”
“Esmeray!”
“Esmeray!”
“She might have said something.”
“Well, it wasn’t like I was, like stalking you or something.”
“I just can’t believe you’re here.”
“Me too, and ‘here’ here, at this, this place at this festival!”
“Hhhhhh. This is amazing. I hope they can do it again next year.”
“There’s so many Black people here, like so many beautiful people, and really like from all over the world.”
“I kind of feel like everybody’s here too. You know? Kelela, Sudan Archives, Sampa The Great…”
“Sampa’s djying tonight!”
“Three days. You can’t go back! You have to stay!”
“Ha. Where am I gonna stay?”
“I wish we could stay… here!”
“At the festival?”
“If we could just stay here, if we could live in an African future and dress like this everyday and run into Megan Thee Stallion in the toilets.”
“You run out of paper and she’s in the stall next to you and you’re like ‘Gurl you got paper’?”
“And she just hands it to you.”
”Hhhhh.”
”What?”
”Nothing.”
”That phew, that doesn’t sound like nothing?”
”No, just thinking about it. Just thinking about where all of this comes from. I’m looking around and I’m seeing the future but I’m also thinking about now, like right now, and the past and yeah… there’s a lot of hope here and a lot of things that make me think. I wonder if we’re ever gonna get here?”
”That’s a tough one. I don’t know but I know what you mean. I’ve never been to anything like this. Like, I’ve been around a lot of Black people before and we’ve had celebrations and rituals, but this is something… it makes me think about the past and how we’re still, we’re still kinda there.”
”Ja. But we’re ‘here’ here now. I get to be here with you and you, you’re here with me.”
“I wish I could take you back home and introduce you to my brother.”
“Really? You already wanna take me home?”
”I’ve thought about it so many times. There’s so many things I want to show you there, cos if you can come there then you can really understand… me. There are so many people I wanna introduce you to, and places I wanna take you. My brother can’t wait to meet you.”
”Leonel! We have to call him again, but with video.”
”Yeah, let’s do that.”
”You have to come though.”
“I will. I wanna see where you live and where you grew up. I wanna see your home, your world.”
”Hmph. My world… I don’t know if it’s my world but it is home.”
”Mexico. Thanks for trying to hold your own earlier.”
”They’re not so bad. I like them. They were nice. To me.”
”That’s just our dynamic. Everything kinda turns into a competition and… like a show.”
”It was kinda like the olympics, but, phhhh, at least you still have your parents. It’s just me and Leonel, and at least they, they support you.”
”I know. I also know that they’re a lot so thanks.”
”It’s nothing. I’m glad that they wanted to meet me. The only… weird part was that they kept ‘shipping’ us, like so hard.”
”Shipping?”
”Um… yeah, it’s like…”
”I don’t know that word.”
”It’s not a bad thing!”
”Ok.”
”No! I mean… like, all the questions they kept asking about like, ‘Is instagram about dating’, and ‘What do you see in the future’, and ‘You’re obviously more than friends but how do you define things’…”
”I know. I… ha ha ha ha ha. I tried to warn you. I did.”
”You did, but… that’s not, you can’t just warn someone about… that. You have to give them a class. You know? Like, I just didn’t know what to say. I was not expecting that. At all!”
”Hhhhh. Ja. That’s my family. Maybe you should run now.”
”I didn’t come all the way here to run. Not from your, very…”
”Ooh she thinkin about it.”
”Yeah, cos I don’t want you to get mad at me. I don’t wanna say the wrong thing… so… your very curious parents. Curious. That’s the right word!”
”That’s just you being nice.”
”Leonel can be a lot too, but in a different way.”
”I’m ready.”
“Would you wanna go? With me? Is it… do you think you… can come?”
“Tsk! Of course. Of course I wanna go.”
“Look at us. We’re already talking about being somewhere else instead of being here in this Binti, Okorafor space world, and later tonight SZA, we’re gonna see SZA...”
“Well we are being ‘here’, right? This place… I didn’t know what to expect. I knew with all of the people performing, and the artists, and the events that it was gonna be something but, you know how you can imagine something and then it’s like what you im… the real thing is something that you could never imagine. Like, it’s impossible that you could… what’s actually here, what this is, is nothing that you could like, imagine.”
“Yeah. It’s like this was the perfect way for us to meet. The perfect place and the perfect time too. Finally in real life, no screens, no time zones, no borders, in all of these amazing people’s ideas of what could be.”
“As soon as I saw that this was coming here in Berlin, I was like, this is how I’m gonna meet them. This is how we have to do it. I’m really glad you came. I think… I think when this is over, if you went to one show or if you went to all of it, if you saw everything, you leave here with dreams. You can’t come here and see all of these Black people laughing, dancing, in costumes, making art I guess, you can’t see it and not… just go back to the way things were. Go back to life back to reality.”
“Don’t forget the food!”
“Food is life!”
“You told me that Jamaican stand, you said that they have a restaurant here?”
“Yeah. It’s close to Esmeray’s. Like maybe two, three blocks.”
“I’ve never had Jamaican food before. The goat curry plate!”
“I didn’t have it until Esmeray was like you have to go to this place by flat, and then she told me it was queer and we went there for the first time and it just felt like, like I was at home. There aren’t a lot of Jamaicans here I think. I only know them. I don’t know them so well, the owners,  but they’re really nice and I go there a lot. We should go.”
“I’m gonna try to take some with me on the plane.”
“I wish I could go with you to the airport, like through to the security gates.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not…”
“I wanna say I can’t believe they treated you like that. We should’ve thought about it. I should have thought about it. That’s how they treat my family too when they come from Sierra Leone or Angola.”
“What could you do? What could I do? At least you were waiting for me on the other side of the, the gate. I didn’t even care as soon as I saw you.
I mean besides the other questions that they always ask me at the controls, the way that they didn’t believe my Mexican passport was real.”
”Sometimes I think they just can’t help it. Didn’t we already walk this way?”
“Yeah we did. What do you wanna do now?”
“More food?”
“You’re always hungry.”
“I never asked you if you cook?”
“Does salad count? I can open cans, and boil hot water, for pasta.”
“Okay that’s not cooking.”
“Well, for tonight I can buy you something else to eat if you’re hungry.”
“Na. I’m not really hungry, I’m just being greedy. Everything is here. They’ve even got like Mauritian food. I just want to eat everything.”
“So let’s do that! Then we can dance later.”
“I gotta do something with my hair. Can you help me like…”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Just oh, just tie it up. Like in a bun. But food first. Then drinks. Then…”
“Are you gonna do the costume contest? This is the longest we’ve gone without someone asking to take a picture of you.”
“Honestly I’m more worried about how we’re gonna get home but we’ve got hours to figure that out.”
“Before the food, before worrying about getting to your place, how do we get out of this spaceship installation thing?”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021