Summertime. It’s July but it’s rainy and windy, like autumn. Something starts to slowly shift within me: a sluggish reaction to this sudden weather change. I can still smell the sunscreen on my skin. I am summer. I smell the rain. It’s autumn.
I’m confused.
I touch my sunburnt nose and my mind drifts back to that big umbrella by the sea (“I am summer”) as I watch the awning shake in the wind (“it’s autumn”). I want to eat an ice cream but it suddenly feels very wrong. I’m shocked at this realisation. My feelings, too, shake; they peel out and lunge at me menacingly like a huge, rough sea wave. Sadness acts like rain and soaks me up; restlessness imitates the wind’s fury. I am autumn. The flowerpot on the balcony falls over (was it blown down by the wind or by my restlessness?). A moody weather, inside and out, in the middle of July. I try to regain control, become summer. Everything is autumn, inside and out, in the middle of July.
“Is it possible that feelings make the weather more intense?” I ask myself. I immediately find the thought absurd, but I don’t completely dismiss it, either. I close my eyes and picture gloom coming out of my mouth, like cigarette smoke, penetrating the air and turning into a drizzle or a storm.
It’s raining gloom.
I hear the sound of rain. I feel alone. I hear the sound of water running in the shower. I’m not alone. A man is having a shower. I’m shocked at this realisation, as well. This man is part of the picture of the big umbrella by the sea; it’s his hands that are putting sunscreen all over my back. It’s raining now and the awning is shaking. His presence incites a confrontation: I’m torn in half and the two halves are fighting each other: summer or autumn?
The man has finished his shower and is climbing up the stairs; he is here. My confusion has gotten washed, walked up the stairs with him; ‘she’ is here. We’re all here. The man takes an ice cream out of the freezer. I look at him and I smile awkwardly as I watch my confusion stand beside him, by the fridge, wrapped in a towel, teasing me with a smile – a sexy, wet confusion. I ask her to take a walk outside, in the rainy July weather, and leave me alone with him and the ice cream so that I can become a hot summer. I want her to leave so that I can melt in his heat. I want to watch my body and my sense of self go beyond their limits. I want to be the ice cream in his hands and mouth; a melted ice cream. I want to stain his clothes, stick myself onto him, let myself be licked by him insatiably until no trace of me is left.
The thought of it makes me sweat with excitement. I smell like sunscreen. I am summer.
Translated by Natassa Diamanti
photo by Andreas Theologitis
http://photography.atheo.eu/