In this kind of heat, the parts you take for granted make themselves known. Creases of your elbows, the backs of your knees. Your feet swell, the skin cracking. If you hold your thighs together the way good girls are supposed to, they have difficulty coming unglued. You, on the other hand, are half conscious, bleary, alive only in the nerve-tip parts of you that know how to make peace with endings. Today your horoscope says that the time is ripe for pleasure, spontaneity, and exploration, hollow words that don’t mean much but that place yet another expectation on the time and space your body occupies. The pleasure your body feels right now is in the rough wooden floorboards, the moments before release. Everything, all fluids and all solid, anchored things, are showing their worn edges.
Who are you in the moments when you know nobody’s looking?
How does your posture change, slip from alert-and-competent-ready-for-anything to quiet, practiced, a little desolate? How do you brace yourself for the moments you fear, moments of rallying a crowd or shouting in a megaphone or telling someone you care about that you want to steal so many moments with them it’s fit to burst? Are you the same calm-quiet, cheerful-tender sort of person? Are you someone that you yourself could love and play with? Where are your too-dark places?
Night, and the fan, and the sticky sweat-on-skin, and the thoughts that cycle again and again (if you could hear from one person out of the blue- one person that you covet, that you want in the secret-special way you want the things you’d never admit to wanting- who would it be, and what would they confess? Will you admit to wanting this?- swept up, claimed, desired, washed away).
In this kind of heat, you drink coffee instead of water and wear the same clothes day after day, worn soft from repeated washing. You cut your hair short and wear it like that, off-kilter. You get tipsy from banana juice and coconut rum, and run ice cubes against your temples, both fearing and anticipating the sensation. In this heat you are sticky, see-through, shorn; you make the rules up as you go along, trying very hard to keep Cool.
