Heat

This was written last summer...I think.

Heat  

          I love this time in the south. It’s hot but not too hot. Just barely spring but you can even now feel the overwhelming heated silk of summer hovering over us. Waiting till it’s time to lay itself down on us all.

I think the heat gives the southern summer its atmosphere. It makes the teens crazy, the adults angry and the old ones reminiscent of old simple times.

            The heat makes people too tired to be mean or to mean to be nice or just to damn hot to be good. The heat can make people silky. Silky like hot coffee with cream, silky like a 16 year old skin stretched over muscle pressed against lips, silky like steam built up inside a car window behind a Baptist church with a white steeple reaching for the moon. But all this pretty language can give but an idea.     

            The best part of summer is of course the change in people. Kids are free, teachers are human summer jobs are filled and summer flings begin. Good girls wander in groups wearing capris and T-shirts, a tank top at the least. They make plans to go to the movies or to the pool. A party every once in awhile. They make it home by curfew, sometimes late but it ends up ok. A little drink, but just enough to fake being drunk so there is no more pressure. Cigarette or two because, God knows they taste bad, but the maturity that comes with smoking is too good to pass up. Wednesday’s are Youth group. Sunday’s church. The rest of the week is open to anything anyone can come up with.

Bad girls stalk the back streets with the boys. Change plans for no one. Though only the people involved know them and half the time we don’t either. Call us anything you want just  don’t call us boring. Sublime and Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson and The Vincent Black Shadow, they pump from our MP3 players. That’s right baby, summertime and the livings easy.

Summer heat just pushes it that much farther. All that heat and energy building, passing from skin to skin. Electric currents adding to it; crackling like lightning; aching for some release.

This is the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, casual drug use, and promiscuous sex, all of it. Southern heat is the mother and father of it all. Thats why the blue haired old bitty's hate it so much, they have to see so much of it every summer.

I truly miss those hot days of summer where it felt like every bit of me was glowing with the sun, almost outshining her rays. Summer makes the girls into women and the women into goddesses. We dance in her golden light and swing from her silver moon. Always the heat will be in me. Mine to hold on to and to dream of whenever I am stuck far up north in some blizzard with ice all around, I can think back to the scent of honeysuckle, gardenias and sunshine and smile because I will have had more of that blessed heat in a lifetime then some could have in a millennia.

            As school lets out, the lighters light up, the skirts get short and the shorts get tight. When cops stop to watch; its not lack of trust, its lust. College parties start and suddenly 18 is 21, 16 is 18 and “How old are you?” is “Old enough.”

            But the world keeps moving and the heat gets hotter and the adults get bitter, the kids get wilder as the air gets thicker. And God knows just because we get caught, which we do from time to time, that doesn’t mean we’ll stop going, we just shift the rhythm and tweak the rhyme, till on the outside we’ve changed our ways again, but on the inside it’s the same old sin.