Heat

This is a Magpie Tale

A hazy vision tells me I’ve finally opened my eyes. I am soaked with sweat, from head to toe, and all the time last night I’ve been dreaming I was drowning. I don’t look at my torn watch lying on the next to my bed, I forget to do so, or I just got too used to not knowing time. Days feel like sand grains slipping through your fingers without being able to tell which was Sunday and which was Friday; or maybe like a desert with no landmarks telling you where exactly you are. At least my days are like this. I am still paralyzed in my bed, I am still drowning in the heat.

   The air conditioner is not working. My clothes are sticking to my skin and I can’t feel myself anymore. I need to breathe and I can’t tell whether the air has been sucked out my lungs by summer or by my heart. I am still confused. I forget to breathe. Breathe, Try to breathe. One tear escapes my eyes. I want to cry more but I can’t. I try to pull the tears out, but it seems like sweating consumed all the water within me. Summer has sucked the life out of me. No. Do not think like this. Maybe I am exaggerating, but I still can’t breathe.

   I open the window and stand. Behind translucent windows lives go on. I am the an audience of one to that theatre of life in which the fourth wall has been brought to the ground. A mother is shouting at her daughter. Two couples are fighting. Someone is talking on the phone. Do they realize someone is there seeing them?  It strikes me as peculiar.

   In my bedroom, I turn the T.V on. Was the idea of movies inspired by that person watching you behind his window? All holds no interest to me. Many times a fleeting thought of my life turning into a movie crosses my mind. And I wonder, do we follow the order of begging-climax-end?  No we do not. What if they create a story about someone, much like everyone else, much like myself, who wakes up, lives, sleeps? And in between, there are those moments, those scenes, that begin with the eye sand crystallize in the heart then reflect on the face; moments detached from everything, moments that last no longer than a moment. Things happen in life, major events you might want to call them; movie-makers kill the moments and focus on the days, forcing that second line of thought which has no relation with events, the one that comes from the self to fade. When someone dies, and his wife is mourning, won’t she notice if a woman wearing red blouse and green skirt passes by her in the street? Won’t that second line of thought even force a hint of marvel at her heart before her surroundings sink in again drowning trivial things away. They’d never capture that part in a movie, it has no influence on the plot.

   I fill the bathtub with water, icy water, then strip myself out of clothes. Hesitance pulls me back for a second. At first, I let one leg touch the water, then throw myself in, all of me in. It stings at first, but then I get used to it. I close my eyes and pretend it’s winter again.