Something to read during a heat wave.

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My body feels like it is shutting down, yet unable to rest as it feels like letting go will be too big of a crash. My ambition is over consuming and working against my slow and lazy nature. 

I sit and I stare at the curtains my mother carefully hung up. The uncommonly cold winds blow through the sliding doors of the home. The smell of my skin food, fresh and herby lingers as its pleasant balmy sensation soothes me. My belly full from a meal I consumed hours ago, big and greasy, nutritionally questionable but one that feeds the soul and pleasures the palette. I feel so fulfilled by all that I have achieved these past few weeks, quiet wins. Physically not so good, consistently tired with eyes consistently parched, a sore back and random stomach pains. Although I now live in perpetual summer, my body has still been rewired by the many years spent in Europe—as always when June arrives I am overcome with the feeling of summer nostalgia with a sprinkle of excitement. It is an odd concoction of sensations, one that resembles the Madeleine de Proust where just being in this time of year takes me back to all the wonderful memories and heartbreaks of the past summers and the titillations of whats to come, a time of the year where there are the least repetitions and the most surprises. Despite the weather on the island being the most pleasant, in my opinion, this time of the year, I would have also loved being there. I love Paris in August and how calm she is, she feels like a mother who’s finally got her house to herself. The mediterranean cities coming alive. The stone fruits and the late night sweaty dancing. The sleeping naked in the sweltering heat with the window open and the grimy feeling of wearing flip-flops in the metro. I love it all. 

I sit here and daydream of how tender it must feel to be invigorated with lust there now. I am exhausted but slightly revived by how nice it must feel to share that with someone you are simply attracted to and growing to love. Something that may be intense but isn’t complicated yet. When not all the questions have been posed, answers gotten over an ice cold beer on a warm night or under thin sheets. The gradual familiarity of the other’s hand as you guide each other through a sea of dancing bodies at some festival. I fantasise of the moments of mise en beauté before a spontaneous date to a restaurant we’ve been dying to try or one where I know the menu by heart and feels like home. Walking home tipsy in the quiet and warmly lit streets, as I laugh in their chest over an incident that happened earlier. A night cap shared on the balcony, my freshly painted toes rested on their lap. A kiss is shared in the middle of the kitchen, feeling the cold tiles beneath me. Mornings where the sheets smell like us, the scent of our flesh seeped into the cotton. 

Then there are the early mornings walk home after a night that had been stretched out for far too long, where time flew faster than ever. The mornings where I drag my feet on the sidewalks of a deserted street that will soon be flooded by humans in just the matter of hours, the sky an incredible concoction of purple, orange and blues as the sun slowly makes it’s way up. We hope to make it home soon, because the nausea hits when the rays do. Side by side with the friends I have grown to love like family and maybe a few other people we have just met and picked up and adopted along the way. We discuss all the different episodes that happened, peculiar interactions with people we’d only come across late at night, one of us running into a bad date or a really funny incident that caused us to having to run away from something or someone. The bond that is tightened by shared and special stories that we will never forget, turning us into broken records on different drunken nights, still laughing with the same force each and every time. 

Or the first dip after a very early train at Gare de Lyon, all the sweat of picking up and dragging suitcases all morning finally washed away in the beautiful blue fresh waters of the Mediterranean. As the salt slowly dries and sticks to the skin and the seagulls scream above our heads, the first bite a sandwich with robust tomatoes and good butter takes away all sorts of discomfort like strongest medicine to ever exist. Hours and hours of switching from sand to water, with a book in the midst of it all, so captivating and beautiful written that you don’t hear your name being called by your friends when they suggest to pack and up and get ice cream before heading back to someone’s family holiday home where you’d nap next to somebody you sleep better with. 

And when the night falls, and our faces, tight and sensitive after neglecting sun protection, emit a glow one that cannot be recreated and gives a type of confidence that cannot be overshadowed. Tiny dresses and flip flops, walking out the door knowing that the bathrooms we got ready in resemble the aftermath of a pillage. Tummies hungry and ready to down some seafood half eaten with our fingers washed down with some local wine. Background music accompanying our heartfelt conversations as we lay back on the plastic chairs, glass in hand and the back our thighs leaving sweat marks on the seats. 

I dream of the sun and the heat, so intense and overstimulating, and of all the ways to escape them. There is something beautiful about a problem whose solutions are so lovely: plunging into cool water, eating fresh fruit, sipping cold drinks, resting beneath the shade of a tree. Sometimes I think heat may be the easiest hardship to forgive, because overcoming it leads you straight into pleasure. I only wish all difficulties could be met with such gentle remedies.

I am a touch sad to not be able to make it out there this time around but am looking forward to going back to my long and boring summers as a teen. The days may be shorter and we may not have peaches and plums, but it is kite season as we call it here. The wind is cooler, the sun feels a little more gentle and the beach days are most of the time guaranteed.

I have also fallen in love again—this time at home. It feels especially precious, a tale I may choose to keep as my own forever.

He is still fairly new to the island, yet he is the first person to be curious enough to learn about the place that shaped me. I never expected that simple curiosity would move me so deeply. In return, it has given me a fresh pair of eyes, like those of a child newly awakened to the world. Through him, I have been gifted the chance to see my home from a new perspective—to rediscover the island, its beauty, and all the quiet subtleties I had long taken for granted.

Vahine Blaise, Bali, Indonesia,

June 2026