Day 22 𖦹 COLLIDE

Naqiya is serving the tea! Sounds include honesty, an original poem and a love story. Plus, some guitar strumming from Andrea Sofía. Until tomorrow!

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SPEAKER_05 0:00

Okay. Day twenty-two.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Free tea.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Thirty days of free tea in Mary Hernandez Park.

SPEAKER_04 0:17

Hello, hello. Nikia in the house. How are you feeling about the day you have ahead of you?

SPEAKER_03 0:24

I'm feeling very excited to finally do what my partner has been doing for the last three years. Finally see what's going on behind this table, you know. It almost feels like we're having a little bit of a bonding day, even though we're not gonna be together the whole day. Because I'll be doing something he loves.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Yeah, well he loves his stand.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

He loves the tea stand?

SPEAKER_05 0:51

Tell me the story of you and Nakia first meeting.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

It was one of the first post-quarantine parties, and I saw Nakia and I was like, that person's really cute. And I was like, I'm I don't really care what happens tonight, I just want to make sure I talk to that person. Then we ended up on the fire escape together. And so yeah, we we were like chatting out on the fire escape, and it was flirty and romantic. And then like on the way out, I was like, okay, bye, like, have a good night. And the kid at this point was very drunk and was kind of like tipping over and just kind of like turned to someone and was like, he's so sexy. And honestly, I still maintain that if she hadn't said that, like, I don't know if I would have been as like confident to be kind of persistent.

SPEAKER_03 1:47

No, you read the first line.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

You read the first line.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Okay. No, I'm gonna say it really weird. You do. I very much was like, this isn't gonna be a thing because he was living in New York and I had no plans to move to the city.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Nakia was like really giving me nothing, honestly.

SPEAKER_05 2:04

So pretty much you invited Nakia to come to Cape Cod for a day. Yeah. Typically it's not something that you would do.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

Yeah, I was debating like not coming up until like the last hour. Sorry. Um were you nervous? Yeah, I was definitely nervous. I stopped 20 minutes before I came in the Cape House and did my makeup. And I listened to really hype music and then yeah, pulled up. So this was very like very new to me. Um, so everything felt like uh I'm jumping off a cliff right now.

SPEAKER_04 2:40

And how did it feel to jump off the cliff and then see miles?

SPEAKER_03 2:46

It felt really good. I mean, I feel like s I still have it in my brain, like the memory of seeing you coming out on the porch to say hi to me when I pulled up.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

It was amazing, and I think Nikia read me a poem that she wrote at the end of our time together.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Okay. June comes softly, as if there's all the time in the world. Lush, insistent, green, fingers pointing by the pond where nobody breathes, life struggles to shore.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

And it just cut straight to my soul. We couldn't kiss because I had mono or something. Is that right?

SPEAKER_03 3:23

Catching shards of glass in my teeth, a kingdom sins patiently inside a shell where you and I take turns listening for secrets. And yeah, then I was definitely like just like fully all in. Yeah, I'm all in. Like I'm gonna think about you 24 seconds. Let's do it. Same eyes. In the yellow kitchen beneath the long stretch of stars, wind in my throat. When the tide goes out, am I still there? Sitting next to you, salt in our hair, a million pieces of the universe stuck to our heels. In my dreams, we catch rainbows and lay them out on the coffee table. In the morning, when silence hugs back like an old friend, I find the hand without looking. We also meditated.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

By the pond.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

Yeah. And I was very anti-meditation, and you were like, let's just do it, and I was like, this guy. Slowing down and like breathing is not something I was taught to do, or like was even like ever someone who like could entertain that thought, because I was kind of always like in a flight or fight kind of mode growing up. So yeah, doing that was like very important and in the sense of like knowing I could do it.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Like it felt like the things that we were doing, the pace that we were walking, when we were cuddling, like the way that our bodies fit together, like it all just made sense. Just felt like the world was shifting around us for us.

SPEAKER_05 5:07

Have you wanted to do a tea stand takeover before?

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Um honestly no. I I feel like I've had a sort of like tumultuous relationship with the tea stand because it like, you know, takes my partner's attention away from us and me, and so sometimes I have a hard time being like super ecstatic about it.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah, it's been a serious challenge. I had no real conception of doing something like this. Like every opportunity to collaborate, I was like, oh, look at this.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Like I I gotta do this once in a lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

And then it was like another Friday night, I'm off serving free tea somewhere. Another Saturday I'm off serving free tea somewhere. During Perpetual Brew, it's like a really extreme version of this where like I am not going over to her apartment at all this month. I've not spent a single night there. It's only a 15-minute bike right away, but I haven't, and so like the onus is on her to come to my place. And when she does, I'm exhausted, and I'm like, I need food, and I'm tired, and I'm a little baby.

SPEAKER_03 6:26

Hi, love.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

I feel like you're just like I was like so tired, it was like 11.

SPEAKER_03 6:35

I had a yoga class two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

And she was like, Can we please do like a call before bed? And I was like, Oh my god, like I'm exhausted. Don't want to do a call, but like, okay, sure.

SPEAKER_03 6:48

And we were meditating at the end, and I was just like having a crazy m moment with the meditation because the sun was coming in through the windows and I could like see it against like the back of my eyelids, and I was just thinking about how like it honestly be really nice to do the tea stand. I just felt like very like you know, aligned for a moment of like, yeah, I actually really want to do this.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

And so she FaceTimes me, and then she was like, Oh, you know, I was thinking what if I took over the tea stand a day this month, and I was so happy, and I started crying.

SPEAKER_03 7:24

Stop closing myself off from all the goodness.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Wait, what are you trying to say, bro?

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Yeah, because it has been. This month has been hard, and I mean it's all been hard. It takes like this is so important to me, and our relationship is so important to me, and those things are intentional. Instead of these things being on the opposite sides of the spectrum, they were coming together in the middle. That makes me so happy.

unknown 7:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 7:57

You got tears in your eyes.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Yeah, I'm crying. What about it? Everything is gonna be okay. Okay. It's 601. 601, alright, shut it down. Day twenty-two, baby, we did it!

SPEAKER_05 8:12

We did it, we did it. Day twenty-two.