The sun doesn't burn me—it drinks me slowly, like honey sliding off a spoon.
At first, it’s subtle. A bead of sweat finds its way down my back like a curious child exploring a forgotten hallway. The heat whispers to my skin, persuading it to loosen its grip on form and function. I am no longer made of bone or will. I am a soft candle left too long on the sill.
The air shimmers with fevered sighs. My shadow dissolves into the pavement, stretched and thinned, until I wonder if I ever cast one at all. My feet, once sure and stubborn, now slump in my shoes, unsure if they belong to a creature or a memory. I walk, but with the gait of someone who has forgotten what walking is supposed to prove.
In the mirror of a car door, I catch a glimpse of myself—blurred, fluid. My edges wobble.
I’m becoming something else. Summer doesn’t kill; it consumes. The heat laps at my cheeks, kneading them like dough, shaping them into someone softer, less defined. I feel my thoughts pool beneath my scalp, too languid to climb back into coherence. Even language begins to melt, vowels running into one another, consonants dribbling into sighs.
The world around me plays tricks: sidewalks buckle, trees drip their green into the sky, birds cry out in slow-motion echoes. I think I hear a cello, or is it a cicada? The distinction doesn’t matter. I’m not certain where I end and the humidity begins.
I am syrup in a summer jar, sweet and slow and endlessly dissolving.
The rules of matter surrender under the sun’s gaze. I drift toward a bench but become part of it before I sit. My arms stretch like taffy. My breath is more steam than air. There is no pain in this undoing—only a surreal pleasure, the kind one might feel in a dream where gravity forgets itself.
Each moment erases a little more. My name peels off like paint. My memories are cubes of ice clinking in a glass, melting just a touch faster than I expect. Childhood, heartbreak, taxes—all of it evaporates into the heat haze, replaced with something older, perhaps simpler.
In this slow disintegration, I become what summer wants of me: nothing and everything.
I am the mirage on the asphalt, the warbled shimmer on a windshield, the sigh of a fan blade turning at noon. I am not disappearing—I am transforming. Summer is not my enemy; it is my artist. And in this melting, this sacred surrender, I find a kind of truth: to soften is to survive, to dissolve is to be free.
So let the sun sip me down to the marrow. Let July sculpt me into liquid gold. I am not made for winter's sharpness. I am meant to melt, gloriously, into the heat.
