Heat

It is too hot to be inspired. The sun has eaten up the sky and the tin roof over my house crackles and sizzles. I lie down on a sliver of shaded pavement, in plain view of the neighbours, palm curved over my eyes to protect them from the sun.

The birds do not perch for too long so that their feet do not burn. I won’t be out too long either, for similar reasons. The trees stand still, like they’re waiting for the heat to pass before they resume movement. Like it is too laborious to sway.

I need this heat to break; a cool breeze will jolt me alive. When I leave here to go inside, I will trade this heat for a denser, thicker, more breathless heat. I will lie down on the tiles inside my room, pressed against them until my heat robs them of their cool, and then I will think about shedding my skin like a snake, and the thought of it will cool me from the inside, if only temporarily.

My heart and my soul and everything that I am rests at the tip of my tongue. Every pore is screaming, tugging at the world’s ears. I am choked by wordlessness when I try to express it. I am unable to send it out into the world. It’s this damn heat; so I throw the windows open, but this is a ventilationless room, in a ventilationless world, and they look out onto a wall on one end, and into my neighbour’s kitchen on the other.

She was cooking that day. She cooked a fair amount for someone who lived alone. I smelled her food through the window almost daily. I knew when she was home and what she was cooking. I knew the name of her cat and the singsong way she called it.

I was hot and frustrated, beads of sweat dripping off my hair and rolling down my chest into a puddle at my feet; and then she started playing music. Who listens to loud music in the sweltering heat?

She was listening to — so we were listening to — Eusexua.

I dragged myself across the floor to the plastic white chair in the corner of my room, facing the window at an angle so that I could see her, but she would not see me — not unless she was looking to see me. Our matching wrought iron window bars swirled and dipped. Our windows were thrown open in hopelessness as our homes breathed in one another’s stale air. She danced, in a camisole and shorts, as she made what was unmistakably jollof rice, and it smelled amazing.

I started to watch her then, on hot days, because she made me forget that it was hot. The discomfort ceased, and I no longer felt motivated to pull the hair out of my scalp. And then I watched her more frequently. I watched her when she played a song I liked, or when I heard impassioned singing. It was an offhanded watching, in the sense that I was allowed to senselessly devote myself to this insane act as long as I did not think about it. I was merely looking out the window as far as I was concerned. How else could I rationalise it?

I began to fall asleep to the sound of her laughter, talking to people on the phone. Her dance music oontz oontz-ed through our paper-thin walls made even thinner by my almost subconscious straining to hear the floor creak under the weight of her feet and if possible, to hear the breath in her lungs.

That circular synth, it must be fuel. She danced through the day, through the weariness of life, through no-power-supply and no-fuel-to-buy days. If the world were burning, I reckon she’d be dancing barefoot in the ashes. She was not a particularly great, or even good, dancer, by objective standards of rhythm and movement, but I have yet to see a better dancer. She moved with a reckless abandon that said, “watch me, or join me, I dare you.” Her limbs had minds of their own that worked in imperfect unison, without her input. The music was the puppeteer, and she simply moved accordingly, sans coordination. Even her face was part of their symphony. Her waist was the conductor, and I never grew bored of watching her.

When she hosted, she was amazing. A thunderstorm rolling through her kitchen. Supplying drinks here, a witty joke there, artfully sliding a lighter under someone’s cigarette before they’d even thought to ask.

I wanted her uncontrollably from then on, because if it were the two of us, then we could shed our skin together, and the heat would be bearable. She’d blow onto my neck and back and I’d blow onto hers. We’d keep each other cool. I too wanted to stand in her kitchen, listening to her at her most charming.

Yet, when I saw her outside in our shared yard, weaving her way through children playing and women picking beans and tossing egusi, I did not even look at her. I stared down at my feet, or at the walls. I feared that one look at me — that if I let her see my eyes, they would betray things that even I was not entirely aware of. She would feel the desire rolling off of me in waves.

One day, I heard a loud bang from next door, and then their lights went out, and then a knock. It was as though an angel had descended from heaven to darken my doorstep. The lights had gone out and her sockets had simultaneously exploded. Her laptop was on its last legs but she needed to work, and she’d looked out her window to see that I had light, so she’d come. I couldn’t turn her away, could I? Of course not. Apollo himself had visited EKEDC on my behalf that day. We’d had power for most of the day, which was a rarity. I set my desk up for her to work, plastic chair scraping the floor as I relocated it to serve a higher purpose.

She was too big for my room. Too big for my world. Her building had six self-con apartments stacked on top of one another. Mine was a mess of shared lots and rooms of which I had secured a solitary room and bathroom unit. The one good thing about this prime real estate, I would come to find, was a tall, dark-skinned woman, Sade, whose singular presence gave me a new lease on life. My bed shrunk into the corner to accommodate her and the linoleum on my floor was suddenly torn in odd places I had never noticed before.

Sade talked a lot, as expected. She introduced herself, and asked me questions, and tinkered with my things. I offered her water, and we complained about life and living, and our neighbours, and the heat. I asked her if she smoked, knowing the answer was yes, and then I rolled her a joint. I hovered around the desk while she worked, eager to please, like a puppy. After a few hours, when she needed to take a break, she lay beside me on my bed and we stared at the water damage on the ceiling together in silence. She’d brought her speaker along, and she asked if she could put some music on, so we listened to Eusexua some more. I did not tell her that I had heard it a dozen times before, because of her, and that every time I listened, I was a little changed by it.

We lay together in my bed, in relative darkness, long after the power characteristically went out. She was done with work for the day, but she liked my company. She wished we’d spoken sooner.

It was a different kind of hot. The walls of the room compressed and shoved me closer to her. My heartbeat must have sounded like an alarm because she turned to look at me, and in that moment, locking eyes, I feared that she saw through me. I also felt, somehow, that she was the same as me, unmistakably, though I could not really know, if she did not say it herself. It felt like electricity, to be locked in her gaze. There was a certainty to my wondering.

I tried to ask her questions with my eyebrows and my sighs and the awkward wringing of my fingers, but she deflected them all. Yet, she did not feel like a stranger. I had taken her in what doses I could afford for months, and I knew that I wanted to hear her breathy laughter in my ears. I wanted her to say things to me that she could say to no one else.

We started to greet each other after that, and I saw her outside of the window frame, and often, in my bed, and at my desk. I learned the sounds her feet made on my floor compared to hers and when she brought her cat over, I too called his name in a singsong tone. When it was hot, as it often was, with or without power, we huddled together for company and the quarterly “ah, it’s so bloody hot” exclamation that was met with passionate agreement.

She invited me into her apartment, and I marvelled. The mental constructions I had made of it from my bits and pieces of stolen information fell short. It felt like I had been let in on the most amazing secret. I wanted to touch everything, to taste and smell the furniture and trimmings. Something about it felt unreal, like I was in an ultra-realistic dream rigged to trigger all my senses. What is this swelling in my chest; a heartbeat? A lust for life? Love? Hope?

When she lay next to me and we listened to music and stared at the ceiling, I imagined that we were in love and that she was as bothered as I was by this proximity. I imagined that, like me, she vibrated from the inside out when our elbows stuck together, when our thighs touched, or when she kissed me with tongue and called me baby.

She talked to me like the people on the phone. She complained about work and life and the heat and I consoled her while I myself died slowly from these predicaments. I wanted to scream, every second sentence, “Be with me! Love me! Let us suffer together!” But what could I tell her?

“Your institutions are whittling down right before you. The fabric of society unwinds a little bit more every day. The world is ending as it has been ending since the day it began, in the same way that we are slowly dying from the moment we are born. The beginning heralds the end. They are impossible to separate, and we must think of one only in tandem with the other. I am not asking that you die with me, but that you —shocking yourself and myself and the world — live with me. Let us fashion a world for ourselves, here. A life where our love is three-dimensional for those with eyes to see. I know the language of love. I know where to tickle and poke, hard pulls, soft pushes. I know how to worship and serve. I could do it to and for you. I’d make it my life’s purpose.”

But I cannot tell her that, because this want suffers from inherent vice. Its ruin is an attendant effect. I cannot show her who I truly am because I do not know who she is. If she let me hold her, she would be a porcelain doll in my hands. I am too clumsy and it will inadvertently break, and I will always wonder if I was worthy of it to begin with.

The world will remain small if you cling solely to the familiar, I knew this, and so when these musings threatened to overwhelm me, as we lay in the heat one day in various states of undress, Hunger by Florence & The Machine prattling out of her speaker, I turned to her, and I vomited the words. I laid my soul bare. I felt, with conviction, that it would be okay.

---

Every thought, every action, is an exploration of self. It is the fruit of your soul’s searching, with or without your prompting. I am searching for a touch of the divine. I stare into the sun and I am made blind.

She no longer came to my house, and I assumed that I was no longer invited to hers. She kept her windows closed, and I knew that she must be dying of heat, so the message stung even deeper.

“Forget me, I don’t want to be anything to you. Empty yourself of thoughts of me. Purge your skin of the imprints of my touch, I will do the same.”

Do you know of the morbid insanity of the human experience? Of walking past someone you love, someone you’d die for if you were the type to do that sort of thing, wordlessly.

I stared at her closed blinds in a trancelike state for days. I waited outside, helping a mother calm her baby or cut lemongrass from our shared yard for a chance to lock eyes with her. To tell her everything I could not, if I could only get her to see me again, even if for a second.

When I feel like I’m dying, I drink water. It is the first thing I do. I listen to my extremities and routinely let them lead me astray. I am chasing a feeling, that dreamlike haze. Like following a scent with your eyes closed. Take me back to when she was a painting in a portrait in that window frame. Two-dimensional.

Oh for shoulders to kiss, collarbones to trace, hands to hold. Should I have let it be what it was? Did I ask for too much? My window seat was likely as front row as it could get.

I’m having elaborate dreams of nothing. Swelling plots and scenery that I feel through the walls of my consciousness so that I wake up wondrous in my shallow recollection. I see people who no longer exist, I awake in a cold sweat, and ah, it’s so bloody hot.