sweat

It was hot. The sort of heat where you feel sick from it, cloying and wet and sweating and sick. Nothing to be done except sit there and wait, sit and stare and fidget and itch. And moan, and moan.

There’s no better weather for moaning. “Urgh, it’s so hot,” every ten minutes, looped, throughout the day, the night, the whole fucking week of it. Followed up always by “Too hot,” half in correction to that earlier “so”, half in confirmation. Moaning to yourself, with yourself, against yourself.

It was all we had. Unable to even use our phones as distraction, our fingers and thumbs too drenched in sweat to operate the screen, their innards and workings too hot to cope, their response even more pathetic than ours – screen glitches, randomised resets, refusals to turn back on. At least the sun doesn’t make narcoleptics of us all. Not yet, anyway.

Out of the house she comes, her hair still wet from the shower. A new summer dress, a radiant smile. A slight fragrance of something, some scent of flowers or fresh fruit. She drops her book on the table top, sits in the seat next to mine, takes a sip of her drink with a small shudder of delight.

Turns to me.

Smiles.

Glows.

“What a glorious day,” she says, the ice cubes clinking in her glass, her smile as wide as the sky, as bright as the sun. “I hope it’s like this all summer long.”

The only thing more unbearable than the heat is other people’s happiness.

__________

Notes:

1. Written in the summer of 2020
2. When it was quite hot

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I sweat

I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I

***

I sweat when I’m hot. I sweat when I’m cold. I sweat when I’m nervous. I sweat when I’m relaxed. I sweat when I’m eating. I sweat when I’m hungry. I sweat when I’m ill. I sweat when I’m concentrating. I sweat when I wash. I sweat when I shave. I sweat when I shit. I sweat when I’m alone. I sweat when I’m around other people. I sweat when I’m anxious. I sweat when I wear a shirt. I sweat when I drink. I sweat when I drive.

I sweat when I desperately don’t want to sweat.

I sweat at the thought of sweating.

***

Sweat is not allowed. Perhaps it is in others, the fit, the healthy, the confident, the liked, but in me, no, never. Clothes are chosen in colours to hide the stains as best they can, t-shirts covered by a jumper when that doesn’t work, even in summer, even in the sun. A jacket finally, in this ridiculous futile charade, this self imposed feedback loop of increased sweat production, as I hope to hide what I cannot stop, hope to hide what can’t, ever, be hidden.

***

I sweat so much.

I sweat so much it runs down my face in waves, drips from my eyebrows, runs in waterfalls down my glasses, drips from my chin, percolates through my beard.

I sweat so much the arms of my t-shirts get soaked down to the elbows, halfway down to the waist, so much that the two circles centred round my armpits almost reach each other in the middle, a venn diagram of shame.

I sweat so much my jeans stick thickly to my legs, making my knees ache when I walk. I sweat so much the material of my boxers clings wetly to the tops of my thighs, chafing against the skin there until its as bald as if its been waxed.

I sweat so much some days I can barely use my phone, the screen unresponsive under the wetness of my thumb, necessitating a frantic rubbing of the screen against the left thigh of my jeans, the drying of my hand against the right.

I sweat so much it drips onto the page as I write this, the ink running beneath the drips, spreading like fungus to the edges of each dropletted circle on the page.

I sweat so much my whole skull aches. I sweat so much I feel like I’m dreaming, a strange sense of unreality, a feverless delirium, that comes in waves and only slowly subsides.

***

When I wake in the morning, there’s a perfect outline of my body drawn in salt upon the sheets. At least if I die at night, the police won’t need to waste their chalk.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on July 27th, 2019

__________

an accumulation of things

It Was Hot. I Don’t Know If You Noticed.

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