I like hard work, but I just stare at my computer screen. I like to run, but I move like my joints are poured concrete. I want to cook biryani but I keep buying granola. I like to explore, but I only walk to work and the drugstore. I want cold lemonade, but I drink milky tea. Sometimes my muscles buzz, but if I ignore them long enough they settle for aching.

Nighttime here this time of year is heavy and cast around the edges with overcooked orange, dripping over the outlines of the skyline like a chemical assault. I can’t even go outside after seven, acclimatized as I am to nights cool and black as currant liquor. There’s no such thing as “cool” in this city with two seasons, bubbling asphalt outside and climate-controlled inside, the wall of wet, solid heat you force your body through to transition. Walking to work, I think I can feel all my alveoli straining to sieve the oxygen out of the yellow, thickened air. The ten-minute walk takes me twenty. Maybe it’s my body collapsing.

At night, with nothing else to do, imprisoned in my brown apartment by the coat of heat, I lie naked on top of my sheets and smell Harlem, which smells like wet bricks and weed and raw gasoline, so I don’t have to smell my own sweat and dirty clothes. I could go out running or dancing, push my feet off the pavement or press myself against someone who wants to smell my sweat. I could do laundry.

Seven books lie unopened on my bedroom floor, one more in the shared living room, mingling with the unnecessary bedspread and the piles of filthy clothes. I leave it all on the floor because I don’t really know what else to do with any of it. I don’t take a single step more than I absolutely have to take to keep myself alive and employed.

I’m doing nothing, even when I’m copying vital contact information into the company’s server, even when I’m moving my bag on the subway so one more person can squeeze on, even when I’m boiling water so I can say I cooked, even when I have thirteen Wikipedia articles open on things I wish I already knew about, even when I’m planning courses for next semester, even when I wax my legs, even when I bring someone with an actual job and a broken air conditioner in their office an iced coffee exactly the way they take it.

Some nights, walking home, I could melt into the sidewalk for reasons that have nothing to do with the heat.

I talk to him about what I’m afraid of and he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t understand because I don’t understand, and I get mad at him anyway.

He talks to me about what he’s afraid of and I want to help him, I really do, I want to nourish and soothe and advise, but I’m cold instead and I don’t know why.

I like 1:30 in the morning when I’m in his dorm or he’s in my apartment and the heat is far too oppressive to lie in his arms, but I haven’t accepted that reality yet and his skin sticks to mine.

I like hard work, but I just stare at my computer screen. I like to run, but I move like my joints are poured concrete. I want to cook biryani but I keep buying granola. I like to explore, but I only walk to work and the drugstore. I want cold lemonade, but I drink milky tea. Sometimes my muscles buzz, but if I ignore them long enough they settle for aching.

I’m too hot, I tell him. I’m stagnating. My atoms are clumping together, I’m congealing like that milk I haven’t thrown away, and the process is irreversible and soon I will be a curd, a clot and someone will have to throw me out and deal with all the garbage I left lying around. I don’t say the last thing out loud.

I keep my windows closed because of the heat. Sometimes I open them when my room is too hot, but it’s always worse outside, so I close them again, and the curtains too. I’m down to my last clean shirt.

I repeat the word “winter” over and over. When it starts to sound funny, I switch to the word “rain”.

Orange headlights flicker across my grimy brown sheets all night. They cast my sticky skin with jaundice, stripe the khaki wallpapered walls. I immerse the second set of eyes inside my skull in the colour blue, imagining my hollow body filling like the cavity of a lake over thousands of years with glacier water, too cold to host life, as clear and glittering blue as ice held up to cloudy light.