"Cuz I Love You"
Song by: Lizzo
Heat spread across the city like electricity in water. Steam lifted from the blacktop pavement. Waves of hot air radiated off honking cabs. It was oppressive and the calls to turn off the air to avoid a blackout were reached with guttural sighs. Yet, there was something sickeningly sweet about the humidity and something tasty about the sun’s rays. Across the city an even playing field of heat, a heat similar to passion, romanticized the inhabitants.
Windows high above the street flung open and people peeped their heads out, adventurers and romantics climbed onto their fire escapes. Young girls, and old men, exhausted by the overwhelming warmth, ate popsicles on stoops that weren’t theirs. The rules felt like they didn’t exist when suffering was occurring to the sum of the citizens.
The fire department, drenched in sweat themselves, found a hydrant on quiet corner and cracked it open. Like a dog whistle children from all along the neighborhood heard the song of relief and excitement. The heat was providing a rhythm that everyone started to feel within their bones, and melodies bloomed in gossip, in fights, and flirtation.
Across town, 18 up and 16 over, a trumpeter reached for relief on the roof of his building, and with the heat itching his fingertips he added hot air into the atmosphere in slow, dragging, prohibition era notes that electrified ears as they sensed the deep danger of passion and the excitement that accompanied it.
Three buildings over a young woman, in her primed and painted late 20’s, dripped in excited sweat as she danced in front of her foggy mirror. Her mother always said “white underwear keeps the heat off” but the white underwear she was wearing was just as sweaty as her smiling upper lip. She sang out with the trumpet. Each pitch the brass hit she matched as a remark toward the lust that started to fill her. The lust was not destined for one person but every person full of life that would walk forward in her life in the near future.
She danced in front of the mirror admiring what he had fallen in love with. The hair at the nape of her neck curling up into to tight spirals as her body continued to warm. When she couldn’t take the heat for a second longer, she danced in front of the fridge. It didn’t bring enough of a cool blast to mitigate the heat radiating off her like the blacktop the notes she was still singing reached. Despite the heat, she danced because she didn’t want the love that was in her to ever cool. She danced until she reached the bed which she flopped onto, like a child, like a starfish, like a woman that knew the depths of her heart would eventually be matched.
With the final blow of the trumpet, night turned. The city closed its windows in a drumline as a cold front swept through street my street. The final rolls of thunder made the sides of her mouth curl up. She stood in front of her open window, white underwear and all, mist drifting across her body. Each droplet turned to steam as she was still warm with future.
