Paris, Summer of 2026.
Days melt into one another, form a gooey paste, quicksand, sticky spider webs. There’s no escape; the entire country is a boiling pressure cooker. We stub and bump on the brims looking for an exit, just a slit, a window to open (there isn’t). Suffocating and desperate, out of tears to dry (nothing is ever dry), we get even hotter running in circles. People die. To escape complete insanity, we resign, stop looking for a way out, slow down, find a reason (there isn’t). Access to AC has become the marker of privilege. I don’t even own a fan.
It reminds me of the pandemic—a lockdown on our own free will. You can’t protest against how Nature goes. Nature’s only always right. Nature’s the greatest dictator. It makes me think of Abraham Chance, my python in its cage, just living. Does he feel the asphyxia too? When does life lose all meaning? His cage inside my apartment, a cage, Paris, a cage, the stratosphere, a burning lid. Window panes covered in shining paper and blinds; everything shuts down, and our eyes too, in a global lethargy, tamed, powerless. Waiting for a blue hour, a cooler hour that never comes. It’s the same warm diabolical breath all the time.
At night, the air is still thick, O. and I stay away from each other, gravitating in the pond of our bed and panting starfishes taking turns under the window. Every feeble rustling of air is like god answering a mute prayer, bountifully blowing on our soaked bodies. I don’t like praying, and if I had to I’d pray for bigger things, but I find myself praying for air. We don’t sleep; we fall into a hallucinatory trance. O. came from work exhausted and shivering, went straight to bed, delirious and sweating so much I had to change the sheets twice and feed him ice cream all day. I went to the pharmacy and the pharmacists (all women) joked about men being such babies when they’re sick. We all had a big, necessary laugh except for a profusely sweating young man who was genuinely worried about O. symptoms I had just described. He said, “You should go to a hospital.” I said, “There’s no room at the hospital. And if the reason you’re going is you’re too hot, the hospital can’t do anything about it because it’s even hotter there and they have bigger emergencies like cancer kids who can’t even get out of their overheated rooms.” He blinked in approval, setting off a stream of drips on his forehead.
They couldn’t afford to stop at the workshop, as they were finishing building the Louis Vuitton set for the Fashion Week show the next day. So, they changed the schedule for workers to do just as much but in less time, from 6:30 AM to 3 PM. At 9 AM, the temperature under the canopy is 110°F. And there’s the lifting, the heavy machinery, the dizziness from the heat, not to forget the underlying competition. The bosses are thirty-something-year-old designers, or architects, or sons of designers, or sons of architects, who took the plunge and decided on starting their own business. They hired woodworkers with more experience than they have and are doing really well. They’re the kind of cool, young managers. They insist on everyone taking more breaks, and put a bucket full of ice in the hall. They also asked O. not to take more than one day off and make sure he’s got a note from the doctor, so the company doesn’t have to pay him for the day he didn’t show because of the heat.
I made O. an iced oat latte, and he’d never had one except sometimes in LA, and he said that’s what they’re drinking all day in the office at the workshop. He also said he wanted to have his own company, and would always make sure people get paid if they’re sick. But if they lie about it, he’d fire them immediately. I thought they had no reason to lie if he paid them while they were on sick leave. O. says I’m an idealist because I put a bowl outside the window with pebbles and water for birds, and when none showed, I got sad. He said that’s proof of how our minds work in different ways.
We spent 24 hours cooped up in my 26 sqm apartment, country music in the background, napping, making love, eating ice cream. The survival blankets I’ve taped to the windows bring a day for night light (I’ve always liked better how we say it in French: la nuit américaine – the American night). O. slept most of the morning in the bedroom while I worked. I made him food, washed the dishes, and made sure he took his medicine. We joked about me being a housewife. He asked, “What does a housewife get in exchange for her service?” I said, “Money.” Then added that a prostitute is nothing but an emancipated housewife, who’s gained back power over her means of production. Whatever the housewife supposedly gets in exchange for free labor — protection, security, stability — she provides for herself. He sighed — he really couldn’t get a minute of actual rest.
Maybe because of climate anxiety, or proximity, we talked about having kids in a very real way. Like, how and where we would raise them (we agreed on most things), how many we’d want to have (we did not agree), or what we’d do with them if I had to go on tour. He said, I already have so little time with my work. I replied, then maybe you shouldn’t have kids at all. It kind of bummed me out that he thought my job was a potential problem (when I thought how creative and fun it would be to find new ways to raise a child) when his 9-to-5 situation wasn’t. He said, I’m not progressive enough for you. Then he added, at least seven times a day, I see disappointment in your eyes when you look at me. Where’s the line between disappointment and unmet desires? We talked about it for a while, then he abruptly said, “I can’t see us there.” I didn’t either, but I didn’t say it. By the end of the day, I picked up my electric guitar. He sat next to me and said only nice things, how pretty my new songs were. I felt really happy. He got interested in the microkorg synthesizer, and I showed him how to play with it. I love the childlike joy he has in making music, finding out things and melodies, making up clever lyrics. Then we went outside in the blazing hot air of the evening and rode his motorcycle to the movies. 2 hours of AC for 12€ each, plus popcorn. He said again, I don’t want to give you just a quarter of a relationship, but a part of me still doesn’t believe in us. I still don’t know if this is a dead end or if that’s just how you make a relationship work.
When he left at 6 AM the next morning, I watched the sky thicken with heavy grey clouds. I pulled my head back and stuck my tongue out to taste the mineral mist in the air right before it rains. There was a great creak, and it started pouring. I could hear the drops banging their metallic symphony on the roofs. One crashed on my forehead. I woke up drenched in sweat; behind the silver paper, it’s the deep blue, beaming of death. J. told me some people reportedly said it had rained that morning, but none of them were really sure they hadn’t been hallucinating. I always thought summer was the most cruel of all seasons. Now everybody believes it too. Charli XCX released a new song, a horny summer song under cloudy skies. I don’t even have the strength to follow the link in bio, so I just watch the reel on repeat.
Like a fish in a bowl, I adapt. Is evolution really resignation? Is being in a relationship losing something? It’s been three days since I’ve gone outside. I ran out of food and only drink banana-peanut butter milkshakes, naked, in the after-hours-like light, sitting at my desk. A prison, but curated. My vocal cords are really thriving with all this heat, or maybe it’s my hips, back and pelvis that are happy they’ve spent 2 days with O. — or maybe it’s my head. Anyway, I sing like I haven’t sung in a while; my voice is clear and incisive like an arrow, with Elvis and Wendy Rene perched up on my shoulders, and also the girl singing that rocksteady song “You and Me”. It’s so simple to slide down these days filled with nothing. Does this mean it’s good to be living with someone? Should I stop pushing him away now? Should I give up? On heat, on being right? Even playing guitar is easy. Should I become a housewife?
Environmentalists and farmers and activists stream down my screen. My algorithm is absolutely perfect in the sense that it doesn’t make me want to leave the house at all. O. says I’m a fake leftist because I own an iPhone, and I tell him as long as this society exists it’s okay to have an iPhone, and I will let it go when we start living differently. What’s more accessible? Leaving society or letting go of the iPhone? Which should precede the other? Is leaving society first letting go of the iPhone, or is the iPhone the first thing I’d bury in the forest in a vibrant ritual — when I reach the forest? Everything is burning in global astonishment. It’s Fashion Week, the World Cup, too, and O.’s working his ass off today at the workshop for everything to inevitably burn again, and again, and again.
Maybe equality doesn’t exist at all. Maybe it’s just about the visibility or invisibility of our bodies, on the pitch being watched by hundreds of thousands, in boiling chambres de bonnes under the roofs scorned by the government, on the bench watching, behind a screen witnessing the fall. We’re all aboard the Titanic, and most of the time I feel like the violin player.
