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I remember the shop, even, Tealuxe, a tea house in Cambridge with a variety of teas from all over the world. That was when they came in: a young man with a woman on his arm, perhaps twenty-one or twenty two, chattering at each other in a language with lots of vowels and p’s: paadaa, waadaa, and on. When the man spoke in English it was at high volume. He had shaggy brown hair that went to his chin, a beard, brown eyes as well, and a trench coat, khaki like a detective. She was wearing a striped sweater and some unflattering pants, and she had puffy cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses that hung on the tip of her button nose. But what stood out about the woman was the plastic alien head draped around her neck. It was one of those aliens with a v-shaped head and almond eyes, the popular symbol for extra terrestrial life. The alien head was black and about the size of a grapefruit. Its size was made stranger by the necklace upon which it dangled, which was as thick as a garden hose, and wrapped with duct tape.

Someone asked the young man what language he was speaking, or he volunteered it, or I asked him myself. I can’t remember. What I do remember thinking was that I was happy that there were people as weird as them out there. The man said the language was a patois from the island of Aruba, where they had lived for two years. He did all the talking. In fact, I don’t believe the girl ever said a word. The young man very agreeably ordered the shop’s apple cake, which my brother had recommended to me, but I found a tad dry. (I ate it because it reminded me of him.) The other feeling I distinctly recall was that, while sipping on my keemun tea, I was excited for this life in which I would meet many more people like the couple with the alien head, going paada-waada-maada while ordering apple cake.

I’m older now by eight years, which is not a lot in the expected lifetime of nowadays, but I’ve lived a third more than I had at that point. And I have never met another couple like the ones that showed up in Tealuxe that day. I probably won’t again.

Odder still, those eight years have taught me not to be surprised if I did see them again. I’d be in a small organic market in New York. We might have a casual conversation about their travels. They’d be living in San Diego now with the woman’s parents, after having kayaked in the Torres Straight Islands for four years, and we would speak, perhaps genuinely, about meeting for a coffee because we would both be in too much of a hurry to have a coffee at that moment. In place of a plastic alien head the woman would be wearing the severed bill of a platypus. We would exchange numbers, and he’d offer to teach me how to make an indigenous loom from coat hangers. We would never expect to make good on the offer, because at heart we are Americans, and we often just offer, but I’d hope like hell to see them again because it’s not the job, not the fun, or the excitement or the boredom, but alien heads and platypus bills that get me up in the morning.

–Deji Olukotun