the summer heat feels just like love

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my friends are giggling & then laughing & then cackling in my apartment kitchen, each with cups of wine in hand, drinking as if to burn sins out of their bodies. one asks, what would you title your life story right now? an answer: WELL, I FUCKED THAT UP. another: WINNING AS A GOOGLY-EYED BITCH. & mine: HOW TO SURVIVE THE SUMMER WITHOUT AC. which makes everyone groan. there i go again, bitchin about the heat. yet none of them lives in an apartment that eats the day & throws it up at night. stop complaining, they say before i make a fuss. we’re children of the desert. you’re supposed to be used to the heat. this is true. pero like, being born in a desert & surviving in one are two separate things. they say: remember our philosophy class? you just have to think of the heat in another way. & i know they’re referring to when we read aristotle. he believed we birthed tiny suns in our chests when we entered the world. not a crazy concept to buy into—to test his theory, all you have to do is put your palm to your heart to feel the fire we make. but that image won’t make me any less hot at night or stop my dehydrating-insomnia, & i let them know that: i’ll think of that when i’m shoveling ice out of the freezer & throwing it onto my sheets. not a response that goes over well. insert dramatic eye-rolls & stage-effect moans. just be lucky, one of my friends begins, you’re single. imagine how worse the night could be. i don’t tell them that’s exactly what i daydream about before passing out because then i’d have to tell them what i imagine: the heat, finding love, which my sister describes as the colliding of two suns.

JJ Peña Contributor
JJ Peña is a writer and graduate student in the MFA program at The University of Texas at El Paso. Peña has been published at Passages North and has forthcoming publications in SplitLip Magazine and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
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