Pattern and Forecast (Vol. 3)

This is the third entry in a series in which writers give a report on the weather. Any meteorological statements made may range from the personal to the scientific, from observable weather to the felt. Read the first entry, by Andrew Durbin; the second entry, by Amina Cain.

Greenpoint. A railroad apartment on the second floor of a wood-frame building, looking south through dappled light cast by the ash tree growing on the street below. A season of bad sleep, unease, and frequent nightmares.

It’s loud with the windows open, but I prefer them open, and I prefer to hear the sounds. Voices spill out of the restaurant next door. At night, sometimes, there are fights when the restaurant closes. In heat like this no one wants to have to think, and violence comes easy. In heat like this the body never wants to wake up and never wants to go to bed. It is September, and I believe that the heat will never subside.

On a FaceTime call with my mother she shows me the renovations she’s having done to the house. She is worried about me. Before saying goodbye, she asks, “Would you like to see some daffodils?” She flips the camera and shows me the garden beds. I agree that the spring daffodils growing on the other side of the globe are very lovely.

In the drizzling rain I walk to a party in Red Hook across the footbridge that passes over the cars streaming into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Madelaine and I stand in the garden under a tarp, heavy with captured water and distended above our heads. “Like breasts,” I say, and press my hand against the wet, white bulge. We smoke cigarettes in the green, dense wetness of the garden, watching the other people who, like us, would rather be damp than be inside.

After only two hours of sleep I wake up at 4:30. My husband packs the last of his things, enough to see him through for the month he will be away. I walk him downstairs to the waiting Lyft. I stand on the sidewalk barefoot, wearing leggings and one of his t-shirts. After the car drives away I linger there, looking down the block towards the film studios on the other side of Diamond Street, where the LED streetlights have a strange effect on the night. Everything beneath them resolves into mist. The night isn’t hot, but the air feels malarial, and clammy. The traffic passing on McGuinness Boulevard is muffled by the quiet, wet leaves of the trees that line the street. That night I smoke on a fire escape at a party...