the discomfort is proof of life
for when the sun comes out and i shed a layer of despair off sticky skin
I was born on a far edge of summer and on the farthest edge of the west coast. We were five minutes from the beach. I like to think that the dead heat welcomed me to the world, and it’s been chasing after me ever since.
I used to curse the sun. My body always seemed to retain heat more than anything else and I detested the feeling of it all over me—the sweat, the salt, the way my skin dries sticky after. The baggy clothes I employed to hide the body I was ashamed of seemed to cage me in. Summer was all discomfort and crouching in front of AC units and hating myself.
I know now that I have been so lucky: I grew up not realizing that the sun doesn’t reach everywhere the way it did my small towns in California and Arizona. I treated the heat then like a nuisance. I did not love the sun the way I should have.
I live across the country now, but I chase it. I set the time aside—like I’d never done before—to sit on a bed of grass and feel my cheeks warm. When I do, I recall how I never realized I would have to miss the sun. I never realized that it could go away for months at a time, that it is not promised to us. I would’ve once categorized the sun as being a terrible, quiet constant. I would’ve bet on it.
I have realized, also, that I take an inordinate amount of comfort in my pain. To me, these feel vaguely related.
It is something I cannot say I am proud of, but cannot see myself giving up. It is, maybe, a symptom of New England winter I am still becoming acquainted with, but I get scared that it is instead an irreparable part of me. If I am happy, what will I think about while I walk to class in the rain? If I am happy, how will I listen to Aphasia and cry softly in stairwells?
It feels, at times, like my happiness is a nonrenewable resource and every moment I spend being happy now subtracts from the possibility of my happiness later. It is a dreadful, tiring thought. I tie heat and happiness together in my head. For so much of the year, sad is all I can be. It’s all that the weather permits.
In the winter, I can be terrified of getting what I want, of happiness, since both seem safely out of reach. I can relinquish the idea of acceptance and stay comfortably in the warm embrace of isolation and self-deprecation. Where I spent so much my adolescence and where I spend my winters now.
I can only lie to myself when the sun sets at 4 in the afternoon. The sun brings truth to light and it’s not something I can handle when it is too cold to go outside without a heavy coat and gloves.
A rule though: relishing my sadness is only allowed when I am choosing to cash in the unequivocal comfort I find in the familiarity of my own sadness. When I wield my sadness like both a knife and parachute: to drive others away, to cushion my fall. Wrap around me like a scarf. Hold me like my mother does. Keep me safe, keep me warm.
But the sun doesn’t just disappear when I can’t see her through a full coverage of clouds. She is still there, shining light on some other lucky place. I am assured she will come back. I am assured that when she does, she’ll bring back everything she took with her when she left. All my goodness, all my potential.
It is getting hotter and the trees across the river that runs behind my university are turning green and my despair only suffocates me. Makes me sweat. I have to open a window, have to get my hair off my neck. Have to leave it behind, have to try something new.
The sun opens me up. The feeling of her warming my skin is religious to me. Even when she is so bright I can’t open my eyes, I relish the blessing. My appreciation for heat will never go unsaid ever again. I’m aware of it most now, when I feel myself actively unlearning that hatred I had once for the stuffy discomfort. Still, I sweat the way I did when I was 16. But I can wield it more now like a lesson, rather than a punishment. The questions change.
How could I be sad here, when the sun is gracing us for the first time in so long? How could I be sad when the reunion is upon us? She will return to me and I will say thank you, thank you, thank you.
My love for the sun is, more than anything, a lesson in gratitude. How to love the things you once took advantage of, how to miss something, what to do while you are waiting for it to come back. The sun is something to believe in.
The change of the seasons is promised even when sunlight is not. I celebrate summer solstice with my mother. I understand why people use ‘summer’ as a verb. I go to the place I was born and send my gratitude out to sea. I go back to Arizona and sweat out all my grievances. Is my sadness, then, dormant? Still there, under it all like some foundational thing, like the sun temporarily lost behind clouds in a Boston February?
The first lesson I sat through when I moved to the sunniest place I ever lived was on energy. I was in seventh grade. We talked, briefly, about solar power. There was some quiet camaraderie there, like the sun belonged to us.
Summer is for everyone. It is ubiquitously loved. But either way, I feel special to be from a place that is spared no mercy under the sun’s light. A community of people who have been burned from the inside out, who have been taught to savor the gentle pain of embracing this everlasting heat. Years later, I tell people where I’m from and my skin warms like muscle memory.
In a love letter I’m writing to the places I’m from:
I think, selfishly, that I have a monopoly over the sun. When you think of me, think of the heat. To run from it is, maybe, futile. Stay and let it warm you. Let sweat form and don’t be so quick to wash it away. Revel in the feeling. Take the discomfort as proof of life.