I like it when you’re on your back, facing the sky on a bright day with calmly moving clouds, and one blocks the sun. Your skin cools and you feel the instantaneous effect of the darkness; sometimes you hear wind in the grass, as though it had been too hot for the stalks to blow until the shade came. Then, gradually, as the cloud drifts out of the sun’s way, the color you see through your eyelids, which mask light but not vision*, begins to change:
From black to grey to dark orange to bright red, a flashing and intense red accompanied by the renewed heat on your skin and the flush of your breath from your chest. The red gets brighter and brighter, the sun hotter and hotter, and it seems that it might never stop getting brighter and hotter. Then, when it settles into a stable intensity of heat and light, your marvelous tissues and organs get down the business of regulating your temperature: new waves of sweat, new idle twists of the legs or arms.
(*I’d like to try to describe what happens when I close my eyes and push into them with my hands: masses of electric purple dots, flashing orange and green rhombuses, the sense of falling into a tunnel of beautiful mosaics).
