Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Today was the herald day of the summer.The kind of day where you wake up with the heat sitting on your chest. Settling itself into the air like a fat woman scrooching into a comfortable chair. Spreading bottom into crannies, heavy evenness.
The first real day of summer, today was the day where the heat sits in the atmosphere, seeping into your pores. Not enough to make you gasp, but enough to make the hair on the nape of your neck heavy, and the day turn into molasses. Languid, but not stifling because of the cooler, but redolent with the promise of sticky, thick heat. An idle day that flowed along like a silent river of cream, with me buried in a book after oh, so long! Glorious bliss to wake up and reach for a book, and just sit in one place and read and read like a starving person, as if this was the last book you'd ever read. I gobbled it up, and the whole time the leaves outside the window rustled in the lu, the sky shone a bright, hard blue and Ayesha went to Islamabad on an impulse and Salman went to Karachi and I stayed home and slept on the couch and read, and thought about doing Ethics, of stabbing Pete with a screwdriver, of pancakes and Gule. Nothing and everything.
And the whole time the heat sat around like a friend, like a birthright, like an old ayah pottering around the house. There, but not intruding, just extending opiate fingers to slow down time, sap away hunger, bring the world down into one little pinpoint. Green checked sofa, green lilies on the book cover, blue and green pillow, dark blue denim-clad legs over the back of the sofa. Toes painted sparkly pink. Wiggle. Green of the four Monet lithos on the opposite wall, and my mind is churning out phrases and paragraphs. Disjoint, but each sparkles. Each elusive, each the wonderful thoughts of the half-awake mind that would shine on paper, but die in the grasp of memory. Moth-thoughts, beautiful and elusive, born of the unbridled imagination. Drawn out by the heat that hangs everywhere and is churned by faihtful fans into a swirly, sluggish mess. Familiar, and yet it takes getting used to, every year.
Apollo of summer, today was.
Mina at 7:14 PM
