As I write this, it is sweltering.
My shirt is drenched, my skin prickles and the tiles outside my window are radiating even more heat. There is an expectant stillness in the air, a quiet, breathless anticipation. Clouds scud across a bright blue sky; they're coming from the right direction, but there are too few of them, and they're fluffy and white, practically all silver lining.
Damn. It's still summer.
The Griffin has painted monsoon in its vivid joyous colors, while mine remain a defiant shade of bleak. Several of the images are so familiar from repeated usage, they have now ceased to move. I tried to summon up the enthusiasm for paper boats from General Science notebooks, and while my head says "Yes, yes, I remember", the feeling for it did not return. What will still appeal has to be more obscure ..has to be able to sneak around the back of my watchful cynical brain and bean it with a POW! forgotten sensation.
So my bleak monsoon- The sudden darkening and cooling before the rain; the gray mist that blurs horizon and earth and sky and seems permanent, eternal. Coconut trees like one possessed by the wind, flogged into painful shapes, unable to die. People walking bent forward against the wind, holding up umbrellas flying inside out like flags of surrender. The abandoned beach, with its mutinous waves and impassive sand and redundant soft drink stand. Curtains of a hotel room turning into soggy sails, dank doormats and the gray vapor seeming to emerge from indoor lamps as afternoon gray turns into ashy evening and matte black night of power failures and groping to the bathroom in complete darkness.
Only the unexpected iced coolness of the bed and blanket seem to foretell a drugged unbroken night after the sweat-drenched breathless fitful lie-ins of summer.
