Drowning in summer

Goddamn, it’s hot.

Indiana summers. Hot, sticky, white. Daylight savings time makes the relief of evening feel like it will never come. I thought of Indiana summers when I wrote a line in a poem a long time ago: heart like asphalt, glinting in the summer, spots of white gum, boiling, seeping tar, out of cracks, trapping aphids. I remember recesses in grade school, the melting tar on the blacktop sticking to my sneakers. Everything looks scorched. The trees even look yellow. The sky is a nebular haze, so bright you can barely look at it.

I sit in my apartment sweating through my shirt. I could run a cold bath, but I don’t. This is summer. It’s about the suffering laziness, the anticipation of night, the simple luxury of sitting on my roof, looking at stars, the motorcycles tearing up the street, the drunks stumbling out of the bars, talking to my neighbors across the balconies. It’s about cheap wine, long walks around the empty streets in the orange sodium light, watching fireflies over the soy bean fields, heat lightening in the distance, the old men sitting in front of coffee shops talking about the heat, the desperate drives to the river, the primitive sensation of wearing a thick coating of sweat, dampness from the humid air, smears of dead mosquitoes and dirt.

The Midwest is a place you can only love through a distinctive nostalgia, a lifetime of smells and memories and sites that make days like this reminiscent of some better day years ago. I smell the familiar ammonia from corn fields, the hot smell of cars and I think of riding my bike in my hometown, eating watermelon, catching crickets. What would those memories be without this wretched, miserable heat? How amazing would the wind on my bike have felt and how delicious would those first, perfect watermelons of my childhood have tasted anywhere more temperate? Not very.