mango and passion fruit flavored fizzy water

a fictional guide on how to organize memories in a divided city

I carefully open the bottle and watch the bubbles rise to the top. Adam. It must have been a month since I met him. Nothing about our brief acquaintance is anything worth writing home about. Except it is. The 85p fruit-flavored fizzy water from Tesco or Sainsbury’s reminds me of a man with whom I shared a two-hour walk. Since, in a borderline ritual, I remember morsels of our encounter with every sip. How strange is it, that in passing, a stranger can be so easily remembered, as opposed to being consigned to oblivion. In my fallible attempt to put a two-hour walk into words, I am still trying to search for underlying wisdom that would have emerged from our meeting and find its place in the city I have attempted but often failed at calling home.

We met in front of Oxford University Press, on a Saturday night. It must have been half past ten. I watched a man wearing a white shirt and beige pants cross the street.

“Shireen?” He called out.

As he approached me, I noticed that he looked different from the pictures on his profile. He looked like he aged a few years, between the photographs I had seen, and the man before me. Over text, he let me know he did not like the formalities of a first date, which was fine by me. Even though we had met on a dating app, I had no romantic interest in him. We had a funny back-and-forth over text, so I thought that it would be most likely I would make a new friend, which in an ironic turn, is a common outcome of my use of dating apps.

“Hi Adam. How was your day?” I asked, with an awkward grin

“Well, it was shit. I came from Curbridge with my brother, with some plans for a barbecue and party, but my friend’s barbecue stopped working, and my other’s friend speaker was not working either. I dropped my brother at the bus station so he could go back home”

“You know, I am not 25 years old, I am 21.” He added

I laughed “I do not believe you”

“I will show you” He pulled out his passport from his back pocket, turning the pages to reveal that his birthday is on the 5th of August 2002.

“Why do you not have your correct age on Hinge then?”

“I don’t know, Hinge would not let me change the year of my birth”

Adam led the way at a brisk pace. He walked through the residential area of Jericho as if the streets were his, and his to keep. And I followed solemnly. Whilst I was already confused by how he could be 21 years old when he looked like he was nearing his 30s, I felt drawn by his charismatic energy. I do not want to make everything about astrology, but he fits cozily into the Leo male archetype. Leo is ruled by the sun, which sheds light on how they are a force of power, vitality, and creativity in the lives of the people they encounter. Similarly to the sun by which the planets revolve around, they are self-centered, self-assured, and colorful. A Leo drags the visible light spectrum to your doorstep.

“So you say you live in Dubai?” he asked me

“No, I live in Doha”

“You know, I have been to Dubai once, but against my own will”

“What does that mean?”

“Well I was on a flight from Africa to Europe…”

“Where in Africa” I interrupted

“Uganda… and well, I had three seizures on the flight and woke in a hospital in Dubai. I was there for three days. I kept trying to escape the hospital, but they took all my stuff. I was so bored. The security guards kept catching me. My mom had to pay a thousand quid to get me back home.”

Whenever I asked him about the details of his life, asking when he experienced particular things, he could never really answer. He seemed to be caught up in a time warp of his own. He further clarified by letting me know that he used to speak Spanish following his travels across Latin America, he hit his head badly during one of his seizures and forgot most of his travels, and most of what preceded it.

“I am forgetting a lot of things actually… But my mates help me remember when they give me more details of my memories ”

By this point, we have circled Jericho twice, he wanted to sit in a pub, but the air was thick and unwelcoming. There was no space for us inside. “I have been turfed out of nicer places” he laughed, with a subtle weariness in his voice. He showed me the corner he helped build and remembered a back door that took us back to the main street. The residential buildings cast long shadows that seemed to have swallowed us whole. He made it a point to show me every single one of the buildings and projects that he has worked on.

“This city” Adam ruminated, kicking sideways a can of beer to the pavement “It unconditionally rejects you. You build walls, but they only keep you out”

I nodded and hummed, unsure how to respond to the weight of his words that struck a deep resonance. I know the alienation that clings onto the air of these streets, but the alienation I know is an entirely different one to his. The grand facades of Oxford’s historic buildings are more like barriers than bridges. They separate me from the history they represent, a history that is directly linked to colonialism and bloodshed. A history that is indifferent and hostile towards my very existence here. But beyond that, it is a history where those who live in the town, and those who study in it are divided into two groups, referred to as town and gown. The latter refers to the students who are transient in the space, and the former are the residents of the city. It produces a tale of two cities, where these grand facades of Oxford’s historic buildings, which tourists flock to daily, feel inaccessible to those who have lived here their entire lives. I want nothing to do with the vestiges’ of Oxford’s prestige. But my reluctance to claim this place while studying here is a privilege in and of itself.

Adam let out a sigh, quickly followed by words, “Someday, when I have money from the businesses I am trying to set up, I want to live in Jericho. But for now, I pour sweat onto this area. You know, I work twelve hours a day, I get home knackered, I do not have time to work on developing my business ideas.”

He led me into a dark alley and in that moment, I thought that would be such a stupid way to be murdered. But the lights in the alleyway turned on, and he showed me his friend’s house which he renovated. Adam’s pride in his work was palpable, in the way that the bricks curved perfectly at the top of the house. Interwoven in between the architecture of his pride is a sense of bitterness. Adam wondered if his friend was home, and his phone started ringing. He did not pick up the first time.

“Do you need to take that?” I asked

“Nah it’s just my mom. We have had a complicated relationship.”

He picked up the phone the second time.

“Hello. Yes, I dropped him off at the bus, he should be on his way home. Mom, I am busy right now I can’t call. Yes I drank your fizzy water… It is just a bit of fizzy water. It is not that deep. I am busy I can’t talk about it. I’m gonna go. Bye”

Adam hung up on his mother while she was in the middle of yelling at him.

“Is everything okay?” I wanted to know

“My dad was never around. My mom kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen. Since, I have lived in all sorts of places, and traveled too. But I moved back home, I am skint from my travels. I don’t even live in the house, I live in the shed. But I have a TV in there so it is not too bad … My mom just kicked me out of the house because I drank her fizzy water”

I did not know what to say, or how to handle the situation. He kept walking, unfazed and unbothered. In a possibly insensitive turn of words, I asked him why he drank his mother’s fizzy water. His nonchalance was difficult to ignore. I was equally amused, impressed, and concerned. He had achieved a certain type of freedom that rested on the pillars of precariousness.

“Have you ever worked?” He asked me

“Yes, I have worked in some administrative office roles and research projects”

“But what about now, do you have a job?”

“Well no” I responded.

“How do you support yourself?”

“I have a scholarship, that covers my expenses”

He raised his eyebrows, confused, and asked for a cigarette. At many points of the walk, Adam’s subtle bitterness made me feel that I had not truly lived. He held his imagination of me, considering I grew up in the Gulf and studied at the University of Oxford. I knew he saw me as someone who is incredibly privileged, but I did not think much of correcting him - I know in many capacities, I am. I can’t remember how our conversation turned to politics, but I probably turned it that way. I explained to him what the Palestine encampment was but as soon as I mentioned sleeping in tents and free meals, he grew interested.

“So can anyone just get a tent and sleep there?” He asked

By this point, we were on Woodstock Road. We walked past Ali’s Kebab, Zak, behind the grill, asked me how I was doing. Adam stopped since we had bumped into his friend. His friend must have been in the middle of his 60s. His blue eyes were blank and piercing. He must have been on a concoction of several substances, he could barely conjoin words to form a sentence and seemed to be in a completely different spatiotemporal plane field.

The man looked at me and said “You know, I know Adam’s son”

Adam quickly wrapped up the conversation, walking towards the city center.

“Do you have a son?” I asked

“No, he got confused. He meant that he knows my father” Adam clarified

I thought to myself, how could a grown man confuse father and son when he had said it with such conviction? But Adam’s denial of having a son was convincing enough to me. I do not think I am naive, but I believe most of what Adam said, is a result of his charisma. His awareness of his forgetfulness did so that his disjunctive memories were a story I tried to piece together. A story he pieced together on our walk through Oxford, that transported me into a different world.

He pointed at different nightclubs and bars, sharing the stories behind his connection to those places. That is the bar where he met a 45-year-old woman he had a situation with. That is the club where he was high on molly and was staring into a group of women, which made him seem creepy and got him kicked out. That is the pub with whom he knows the owner, who let him live above the pub for a few months until he kicked him out by trashing his room whilst he was asleep.

“So do you live in Jericho?”

“No I don’t. I was just at my friend’s house when you texted me. I was planning on sleeping over at hers”

“Where is your bed?” He asked.

I gave him the wrong address. It became clear to me that he wanted a place to crash. It is likely that his mom might have kicked him out of the house before our meeting, and that he needed a place to stay. There was no way I would have a stranger in my bed. A silence filled the gap between us. I felt pity for him. I wondered if that was what he intended, or if he was genuinely just sharing his life with me. If he wanted to connect with someone, or he just wanted to find a bed to lay his head on. Pity is a feeling I hate. Nobody likes talking about class in a place like this. Most people here are elitist because they either grew up with it or grew onto it. That evening, I feared my indifference. I feared the alienation that grew on me, but I knew that most of what had grown on me was the result of disbelief and shock. Between an abusive parent and an absent one, substance abuse, and consecutive precarious living conditions, I was shocked at how much he had already gone through at the age of 21. I watched his life unfold in real-time. I could visualize what he had gone through. And that he was trying to make things work.

“It is past midnight, I think I will call it a night soon,” I said softly, a subtle unspoken resignation.

“Yeah, it has been a long day … I can walk you home” he offered

“No it is okay, I will walk you to your bus stop and wait with you for your bus”

We walked against the crowd, against the rowdy drunken loud cacophonies of a typical Saturday British night out. Nights like these heighten my alienation. Each face in the crowd is a fleeting blur, my eyes feel tired from it. I offered him a cigarette, and we smoked as we waited for the bus, and watched two men argue on the other side of the street. We were all bystanders. At some point, a bouncer from a bar gets involved, calling the man getting pushed into the road a little weasel. Everyone at the bus stop laughed. I watched him take a drag from his cigarette and watched the harsh lamppost light reflect on his eyes, revealing that they were not brown, as a matter of fact, hazel. It became clear that this would be the last time I would speak to him.

He made me yearn for something I am still learning to master. That is imposing myself in a place in a city where I am transient, which he has done well for himself. He had an attachment to Oxford, although he only came into the city for his construction work and nights out. Part of his belonging to the city was forged through the bricks he laid. And the rest of the place was found in nightclubs on endless nights. I let Adam lead the way, and I indulged his reminiscences. Beyond his charisma that had drawn me in, he further confirmed something that I had always known and wanted to explore. How cities, despite how hard they may try to perpetuate official histories, are enriched by the memories of those who encounter them. The grand facades of Oxford’s historic buildings, and its longstanding history of elitism, knowledge production, and extraction meant nothing to Adam’s fragmented stories of precarity. He wrote himself onto the city. A widening gap existed in my mind, parts of the city I do not frequent were filling up details in my mind that did not reflect my lived experiences, but those of people whose life experiences are completely different from mine.

He hugged me and said goodbye. “It was nice to meet you Shireen”

As I walked away, the noise started to subdue. I turned back once again, seeing Adam still standing at the bus stop. I blocked his number, unmatched with him, paused my Hinge, and deleted the app. Part of me wishes I did not do that, that I would have at least made sure he found a place to sleep that night. But it was late, and I could not ignore the eerie feeling that was shaping up in the bottom of my spine.