Hot Pavement

**With the passing of my birthday and the start of October, mornings that now require light jackets and long pants, it can officially be said that fall has begun. Closing the door on another summer gone, don’t ask me what happened, it came and went too quick I didn’t have time to remember. Autumn has always felt like a return to reality, to school, to work, a wake up call from a fervent dream. Looking back on this collection of words I strung together in July, that now seems so far away, this piece is a tribute to warmer days. A final salute to summer, before it is wrapped up tenderly with Sunday’s paper and a silk ribbon, tucked away in the back of the closet. Concealed for now, but not forgotten.

The heat takes me back to when I was young.

Burning my thighs on metal slides.

In parking lots overheating like our car that’s been sitting inoperative for hours, it’s doors now flung open uselessly, though we tell ourselves, convince ourselves, it’ll help. Inside I roll my window down, though my mother tells me not to, I can’t wait for the AC to kick in.

Our solarium becoming a no mans land, a whole room in our tiny apartment unusable.

Wet wash clothes on foreheads.

Cold showers.

Hobbling in to grocery stores, beelining for the frozen food aisle that would make me pull my clothes a little tighter any other time of year now seems like a little slice of heaven.

As a teenager laying on the cool grass outside house parties,

Sweat running down the nape of my neck,

Bare feet on hot pavement that hasn’t seen sun for hours.

Moons like blood oranges, and dead buildings.

Friends giggling about who knows what.

Now I walk through air, lukewarm, I can’t tell where my body ends and the space enveloping me begins.

Bits of blue peaking through overlapping branches of green that seem to go on forever, you wonder what occupied the space before summer came.

If I close my eyes the rustling leaves above almost sound like crashing waves and I pretend I’m somewhere coastal, not in this sweltering city.

Brought back by the shrieks of children in playgrounds that somehow sound comforting.

Breezes brush my skin, like the fan in my overheating room, not exactly cooling, just moving the hot air around.

And when rain finally comes, falling in sheets with the sun still shining,

I tell myself to remember the smell after for when this heat is, once again,

Just a memory.