saturday night

Cem and I are eating pizza in the center of Buenos Aires. It starts to rain. We start talking politics, and I ask him why he is an anarchist. He cannot find the words to explain in Spanish. So I try, although my Spanish is worse than his. Instead of answering the question, I tell him I don’t think we can change the world right now, although I want to. Maybe right now we cannot overthrow capitalism, I say. Not now, not today. But the way I live my life, the way I interact with people, maybe I am an anarchist.

Then he lets me know that I am most certainly not an anarchist.

“What makes you different from a socialist, or a trotskyist?” he asks. “Why do you want to wait?” He gets angry and raises his voice gently. For some reason I want to defend myself and explain myself, although I am not particularly invested in labeling myself an anarchist. Either way, I tell him about how in my country innocent people are killed by police, thrown into jail for their political activism, and scared into inaction. “It’s not all about theory,” I try to say. “Do you understand?” I ask. “It’s different.” But I have not convinced him.

“Yes, it’s different,” he says. Then he pauses.

“Have you ever heard a bomb?” he asks me. I haven’t.

“I have,” he says. “Around the corner from my home. 18 people died. I knew 2 of them.”

“Our countries are different,” he finishes.

And on that we agree.

One of my grandfathers is from his country, and my other grandfather lived in his country as a refugee. The island where the rest of my family is from used to be his country. I wonder, do I have any right to call myself Turkish?

And then somehow the conversation becomes about songs from the 80's and old cartoons. We end up singing in the streets and rain and playing video games at a run-down arcade together on this Saturday night in the party capitol of South America.

“You smile a lot,” I say.

“I am an optimist,” he agrees. He has a crooked grin, with a gap between his two front teeth. It’s the nicest smile I’ve ever seen.

Then he walks me home in the pouring rain. Cem thinks his mother’s ability to see the future through coffee grinds is silly and untrue, and I am a lover of magic and things I can’t explain. Cem is hurt by my lack of faith in the present, and I don’t have the words to explain to him that this isn't true in our common language which neither of us speaks fluently.

I walk into my apartment on the third floor and go out onto my balcony, hoping to wave goodbye to him down the street below, but he is already gone. I let the breeze come through the room and keep the balcony doors open. It has been sticky and hot all week. The rain today cooled down the city. A man on the street is singing opera in Italian and Spanish, and his bellows carry up into my room.