hot and cold
and resonance, always resonance.
i think the sound of heat is like a heartbeat.
i feel it now, moving through the bleached and polished clay of the bath, the heavy wet earth of flesh and bone, the charged decimals of millimeters between skin and roomspace. (like a bassline thrumming through the walls, a dirge in the floorboards from under the piano: a heartbeat is a sound you hear by feeling).
when the water you’re in is really very hot, you remember things you usually forget. quiet true things like the charged decimals of millimeters, alive and pulsing just outside your skin — or having skin at all, or a heartbeat — become suddenly loud, impossible to ignore. (this is true whether the hot water is literal or figurative).
i had a friend who always drank cold water in the bath; i wonder if it quieted her kickdrum heart. funny, i never thought to ask.
//
when i think of cold it sounds like dreaming.
a sound like shining, the unsheathing of a sword. a white morning moon in a translucent, watercolor dawn makes the same sound, only slower. or slower still, the fuzzy almost-tone of the house when it’s sleeping. (like ten fingers lifting at once from ivory keys, snow falling on wet pavement: dreaming is an almost-sound).
soundwaves travel farther through cold air than warm; maybe that’s why i think of dreaming. fractals and whistles of faraway happenings, swirling around your ears like breath condensed and hanging in the air.
//
now in bed i hear the freezing night hovering, testing the soft forcefield on the other side of the old glass doors. there is heat in my bones now, after the bath, but i know i should cover up (as a few hours ago i slipped out through these doors to cover the persimmons. they are on the terrace to dry, skinless and dangling, vulnerable. when the cold fell i imagined the slowing of their little heartbeats, tucked an old blanket over and around them — not too tight, they need the circulation. i will do the same for myself) to keep the balance.
from under the blankets i will hear the cold pacing, feel my heartbeat and yours, bodyheat sounds. sounds that tell me we are alive, and almost-dreaming.
all of this to say, stay warm out there, stay open to the feelings and sounds of life and living. it’s worth it.
sending love from here.
💚//mischa