I’ve always loved the heat. When I was younger it was warmly comforting. It meant long days outside among the lilac trees and balmy nights laying on a trampoline beside my best friend Austin; just the two of us and the stars and the singing crickets. Brightly colored clothes and ice cream cones. He would pick a flower and put it in my hair, turned blonde from the sun. We wouldn’t go home until our parents called our names out into the night, and even then we would whisper, “Let them wait just a few more minutes.” We were children of the summer, uncompromisingly and dazzlingly free.
The heat still brings me that same sense of freedom, but as an adult it has become more feverish, taking on an explicitly sultry nature. Long, hot days give life to incessant foreplay. Bare legs, bare shoulders and sweetly, sticky skin. Wild hair, naked faces and freckled noses. We become stripped down versions of ourselves, provocatively and perpetually flushed.
Beads of sweat from our cool cocktail glasses playfully trickle down our fingers and wrists. We slide ice cubes, sweet with rum, over our collarbones. Tie up our untamed hair, wantonly revealing the lovely, loose curls at the nape of our necks.
There’s an intimacy that comes with having a stranger’s eyes on you as your dewy skin glistens in a barely-there dress. An unmatched sensuality in sleeping bodies intertwined on a hot night, when the difference between your sweat and mine becomes indistinguishable.
In the heat we celebrate the body with a primal carnality. We are all pheromones and flesh and uncompromising, dazzling freedom.
