After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.

My weekend was a study in stillness. I had lofty goals and a story to finish playing through, all of which I met and enjoyed, but they were an excuse to refrain from movement. Not that I needed an excuse. It helped to have a reason to be still in what would become the second warmest room in my apartment, but even that stillness was not enough to keep me cool. Thanks to the heat and the emotional stirring of the weekend, I lost my cool in every sense of the phrase and while returning to my ground floor allowed me to resurface from the mire of mixed emotional and temperature heat into which I’d descended, it only served to intensify the discomfort I felt when I’d return to the small, sweaty room. No fans could air it out. A cross-breeze might have helped, but it is a dead-end room, with only one exit, that not even air can escape by any other means. A bastion of comfort in colder seasons as I huddled before the warmth cast off by myself and my computer, lost to the world, but a prison I can’t escape–a reality I can’t leave behind–in these warmer months as I am once again forced to confront all my quiet worries and discomforts. There is no escape far enough to forget when I am wrapped in the slow-cooking heat of my world, myself, and my computer.

Once, I might have escaped into a pool or the wind-whipped shade, but that was years ago and not something I can escape into any more. And even then, nothing short of shade would have brought relief this weekend and even the strongest gusts I felt in my brief forays into the world outside could not compare to the steady hum of my struggling air conditioner and the comforting whir of my many fans. Cold comforts as I am forced to see how they fall short in the face of what is likely to be a more and more common feature of Summer (a season that showed up on its first day with a heat and warmth so heavy that my phone was compelled to blare an alarm in case I missed the many news reports and warnings in my weather apps) as the world marches forward toward greater warmth in the name of a technology that can’t even live up to it’s common name. Even should I somehow escape these short-falling interventions in the future, it will be mere luck on my part and an inescapable truth for so, so many other people, a truth I will be forced to confront by my own well-bred guilt every time the thought occurs to me just how much more comfortable it is to live in a place with central air conditioning. A thought I’ve already confronted even as I sweat and replenished myself so I could sweat more since, at the very least, I wasn’t one of my neighbors whose apartments didn’t include air conditioning units because their landlords were trying to place them with more white people and college students.

Even if it weren’t so warm, I think I might still overheat thinking about it. What else can I do as I lay on the floor in my apartment, feet towards my strongest fan? I might be a part of slow, societal change by staying as active as I can manage, but so much is going on that it’s difficult to ever feel like more than one of the tiny beads of sweat gathering on my forhead, staying isolated and unchanging as the air movement around me prevents it from growing large enough to move but never quite getting rid of it entirely. Is the sweat really doing it’s job? Can it said to be cooling me if I’m staying warm enough to keep producing enough moisture to keep the bead present? Or is the wind whipping around me actually doing the work and the unmoving bead of sweat on my forehead is just there, hoping it might yet grow big enough to move? I know the answer. I’ve paid enough attention in all my health and biology classes to remember how this works. I know that the bead is doing it’s job and that sometimes all I can do is make sure I’m drinking enough to keep sweating since it would be so much worse if I stopped, but that doesn’t make this damp, sticky moment any easier to bear. It does not make my knowledge of that little bead of sweat any more comforting or helpful. It just prevents it from getting worse. Which, given that all those weather apps say that my life is cooling and things are improving, means it should be enough. All I had to do was endure, after all. Just three days. Three days that are over now as night descends, a storm whips up, the temperature drops to something not altogether cool, and more heat looms on the horizon, promising more time for contemplating how far I can stretch a metaphor while I’m too worn out and sweaty to want to move from my floor where the heat laid me out.