I wait for Leila in a cafe. Her first request is to sit out side so she can smoke, then she says she didn’t expect to be free today but her court date got cancelled last minute. “Court date? — Yes I was supposed to be in court today but my lawyer called me yesterday and said it was moved.” Leila got arrested for rioting when she was protesting in 2015 and has been waiting for her trial since then; she’s grateful to the European Union because they’re paying for the NGO that provides her lawyer. So far they’ve managed to move it from a military trial to a civil one, “which is good because a military judge is just some colonel who’ll find you guilty no matter what.” She complains that I’m speaking too softly and says she can’t make her own voice any less loud, it’s a throat thing. I resign myself to having a very loud conversation in a quiet space.

I ask what happened since then and learn that the violent government intervention to the protests was rather successful in keeping people from going out again. At the moment she’s more annoyed with the teachers’ strikes at her university that she worries will delay her semester and keep her from graduating on time. After uni she wants to move to Italy to do a master’s degree because there’s order and things work and the food and it’s European but it’s not as cold and hostile and anti-family as all the North. She’s frustrated with the corrupt government and frustrated with the hipsters who belittle women who wear makeup and the activists who study at the American University and are just so into their fancy education and the feminists who sided with the man that blackmailed her into sex. She knows there are shitty people and especially shitty men everywhere, “but I think not as many as here.”

Leila comes over again a few days later, tries a negroni and says it tastes like a fruity mojito, lights a cigarette in the kitchen and asks if she can take off her shoes. We make fajitas and get drunk. She has a long discussion with my roommate about 90s American hip hop and the Instagram of Rihanna’s mum.