Shenzhen Frio

Like all matters love and disease, it starts outside and works its way in. You awake and see fog on the windows. You kick off the covers and your toes tell you the loss, and to a degree. It hits your lungs next, and then your face, all a parliament of well-rehearsed insult. You sigh.

The sun is a traitor. It hides behind a thousand clouds in the horizon like a shy friend embarrassed about the night before. It sighs. The coffee maker is started by a hand that is your own, but that you barely recognize because your fingers are numb. There is no central heating.

The sounds start up. Exercise and random fights and car horns and middle school propaganda all compete for the apex of your attention but you pour the milk and add the sugar, waiting. The coffee percolates in bubbles which break the rest. You damn the cold above them all for that is where your head is because there is no central heating.

You clank on a standalone heater to damn the cold but the cold wins. Your heater is a matter of radiation, a strange orange glow against the failing sun’s breaking light and you wish you’d bought the one more expensive. It had the radiator stance from whence you still remember heat became but that one was too expensive and plus it had this strange additional contraption that involved water. Oh well, you say, and sip the coffee.

A thousand worries settle on your mind like those cool clouds which coat the orb that has failed all else. Didn’t you worry these last year? No, no. Your kid was just a baby; these are new and justified. The level of the whole world has changed and you’re changed by it too. Worry is all a matter of footing.

The sun marches up. You go back into that bedroom and see that it has burned the fog from the center of the windows and left only those holdouts in the corners. You check to see if you can see your breath so that you can know if it is indeed that cold, but your breath doesn’t show. Where has my warm self gone, you ask, but you already know the answer and that is that you had been climatized a million years ago, or three. The coffee cup is empty, but the girls are ensconced in slumber. They are of quiet worth and a million morrows.

You shower. You put on a tie and a sweater and your best face against the doubt and out you walk into the sunshine and the sunshine is finally doing itself justice. It absorbs into the black heat of your sweater and shoes and you rejoice in the realization that you will or might have one more chance to get up the next and do it again. Your toes are finally warm.