I want summer
(notes on a fever dream)
I think summer is a phantom. Heat and languid freedom have only ever existed in my imagination. These days, my real summers are spent standing in cool, frigid, air conditioned rooms, handing clothes I will never afford to rich people. Or I spend my summer evenings lining up cocktails on a bar, my fringe sticking to my forehead as I quickly gulp down my secret refreshment of ice, lychee juice and soda water before anyone notices.
I tend to get my summer fever during late winter. I get drunk on the fantasy of what it’s supposed to be; walking through a beautiful and humid foreign city late at night, smoking outside a house party - the muffled sounds from inside softening my solitude, swimming in an outdoor pool or stream, or sitting alone in a motel room in the evening. Most of these fantasies revolve around a feeling of solitude, yet a profound connection to an appreciation of vastness, and finding beauty in the emptiness of the world. There is something of an Edward Hopper painting in all of them. If only I could step inside them and make them real, instead of feeling this inversion of nostalgia for what has never existed.
These scenes play out on the walls of my mind like a coming of age film. My eyes are the projectors. And like a retired sports star watching tapes from his glory days, I replay them over and over.
Let’s talk about atomization, shall we?
Dictionary.com defines it as this “the act or process of of splitting into smaller parts, sections, groups, etc.; fragmentation or disintegration: The atomization of society into isolated individuals, who find nothing above them but the all powerful state, is largely a modern phenomenon”. Wikipedia refers to it as the breaking of bonds in a substance to obtain its constituent atoms in gas phase. However, atomization is also frequently used as a synonym for social alienation, and disconnection from the group. It is both a personal psychological state and a type of social relationship.
19th July 2006
In England, the sunlight was white and hot. This bright hotness made all of the shadows seem darker than normal by contrast. Yes, it was all sunlight and shadows. Under the immense heat, the pavement boiled and shimmered. The tarmac on some of the roads began melting and the tacky black substance was sticking to the bottom of pedestrians shoes. Some people were eight years old at the time and consequently do not remember anything about that summer. Nonetheless, it has been well recorded that there was a global heatwave.
The aforementioned pavement was doing a very good job of reverberating the heat that bore down on it. And in turn, the heat was doing a very good job of travelling up the bare legs of an eight year old girl. All day, her long hair had been serving as a veil of protection for the back of her neck, but was simultaneously creating a stuffy atmosphere back there. Since no breeze could reach the back of the neck, it was gradually accumulating more and more droplets of sweat. Breathing through her nostrils, the girl noticed that in the heat, the smell of everything thickens. She touched the back of her neck, feeling the moisturise on her fingertips, and imagined particles of tar collecting in her lungs. In fact, she thought, everything intensifies in the heat.
This was just part of the uncomfortable sensation of having a body on a hot day.
The radio in the kitchen was also doing a good job by broadcasting the news. However, to the girl, it was speaking unintelligible words and phrases, and these sounds were merging together becoming nothing but mangled background noise. It was becoming too much. It wasn’t just the brightness of the day, the temperature, or the smell of tar, but the fact that she was completely trapped. She could have turned on the hose, or stayed inside and asked to put the TV on, but she had the feeling that there was a greater solution. She thought again about the particles of tar, and how they must have travelled through the air and began to feel herself becoming very far away from everything.
And so a refreshing sense of calmness began to wash over the girl, and she took a moment to appreciate the fact that she was alone. She looked down and observed the things that she used to know as her arms. She noted that she could no longer feel them as they moved, with her legs, into the garden. As the body was moving of its own accord, the girl also noticed that she was smiling.
It was a great adventure to discover that you could separate your mind and body.
The small hand belonging to the eight year old girl gently raised itself, palm upwards, towards the sky. There was no longer any sound of the radio that she could hear, though of course it continued. The pleasant numbness had taken over. She breathed in the tar one last time and the atoms that made up her fingers began to drift away from each other. In the most delicate disintegration, the body of the girl was carried away by the breeze that had never managed to reach the back of her neck.
The global heatwave persisted. It continued to break record temperatures across the US and Europe. In India there was outrage when the government banned several blogs. In Rome, an aristocratic house believed to be the birthplace of Augustus was discovered under the Palatine Hill. In Lebanon, 55 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes. In Gaza and the West Bank, 9 Palestinians were also killed by the IDF. The previous month, Israel had started ‘Operation Summer Rains’.
The sentimental longing for something that never existed. The child who atomizes leaves no blood behind.