Heat

Text: Morrigan Fogarty

Image: Alžbeta Szabová

These buildings keep the heat in.

They were made to.

For a time long past, when our fear was the cold.

It swelters now, our sweaty, delirious sins.

These buildings keep the heat in.

The heat rises with the pressure.

We come bearing news of the end, and we feel it all around us, in our homes we sprawl out with bottles of water dripping from condensation, we purchase electric fans to plug in and twirl the hot air around, the effect is a reprieve.

For a second we are reminded of cold on select parts at select moments.

We become addicted to it, we bring in more machines, more drains on the grid.

The lights flicker, the generators spurn us.

We have used them to make these world hot and now we ask them for cold.

What a mockery.

There seems to be no alternative where I am.

This is already a hell, a hot sweltering place where the air smells of brimstone.

The only hope, more conditioning, more air, more cold blasts to combat the rising heat.

More hell.

These buildings keep the heat in.

Are we willing for an alternative?

There are hotter places than this city.

There are more humid places than this city.

Places where the buildings are built to maintain equilibrium, to catch the wind, to utilize that which is already around us to cool.

These buildings keep the heat in.

Must we purge? Tear down these rancid monuments? Restart again and hope that the next century is a hot one, and that our buildings now ready for the waves can harness something other than electricity to keep the elderly from dying of heat stroke?

Are we able? We certainly aren’t willing. To tear down these monuments, to tear down these cultures, to build something that won’t cook us alive.

These buildings keep the heat in.

Open the window.

Feel the draft.

Let the heat out.

It’s not enough

Let the heat out.

We will need more.

Open

The

Window