I feel like a cut of meat exposed to smoke, slowly absorbing the taste of the environment, which is not exactly tasty, but suffocating
While I try, in vain, sleep, come to mind – punished for tiredness and – all the cooking programs I’ve seen in my life. I think, perhaps, these programs can innovate their ingredients, including the “flesh” of the citizen, who is forced to experience thermal sensations ranging from 50 to 60 and a few degrees, as a main ingredient. When associated with the intense pollution of cities, this reality transforms domestic environments, such as the fourth, for example, into a smoking chamber at night. The walls, which spent the day absorbing the relentless sun, now radiate heat as if they were invisible embers.
The hot breeze that enters the open window and crosses the environment does not bring relief – it is as if someone had connected an air circulator inside an oven. The air moves, but does not refresh; It only spreads the heat that insists on sticking to the skin, like a dense and sticky marinade. I feel like a cut of meat exposed to smoke, slowly absorbing the taste of the environment, which is not exactly tasty, but suffocating.
The feeling is to be being prepared slowly, without haste, as in those culinary programs where the chef explains, calmly, how the smoke penetrates the fibers of the meat, giving it a unique flavor. But here, the taste is not spices or spices – it is that of sweat, that of tiredness, that of the heavy air that seems to stick to the roof of the mouth, as if the environment itself was marking me in its oppressive heat.
I await the alarm clock to play. He plays. I get up already feeling inside a convection oven. Starting my activities on the street, the sun at 7:30 am reflects on the scorching asphalt, and the warm wind that hits the face more looks like the forced circulation of an equipment that does not turn off. There are no trees to filter the light, no shadows to soften the heat. Only amplify it. Unable to absorb the heat, the city returns it in suffocating waves.
Walls, floors, asphalts and concrete constructions act as giant electrical resistances, radiating heat everywhere and ruthlessly baking those who dare to leave home. We are like pieces of lean meat left in the open, exposed to dry heat that dries us inside and out. Gradually, we evaporate, drop the gout, like a chicken breast forgotten in the airfryer For too much time: No juiciness, dull, only the insistent dryness of an environment that was not made to shelter us, but to cook us.
At the point of, by the edge of the fifty degrees. The sun inclesses the streets, already hot since the day before, and the heavy air circulates as a constant heat flow. We, the “foods”, are baked slowly. Who hasn’t felt it in recent weeks? The skin gets golden, sweat drips like a sauce that evaporates before it even touches the floor, in a slow, almost cruel but uniform process. Everyone suffers equally, either at the bus stop, in the market line or in the standing traffic. The urban oven spares no one: rich, poor, young people, the elderly, children, animals because they all have a chance to become succulent bakes, even if exhausted.
In the city center, asphalt and the modernist floors of concrete – whose imposed ideas do not even work in their home countries – smoking, creating that illusion of water on the horizon, as if they were a mirage. But it is not any mirage. It is a giant microwave, radiating heat waves that heat out from the inside out. The fever rises from the body to the head, the mouth is dry, the nose burning and the barely dripping sweat, does not refresh.
The steam of the gray city, waterproof by all the politicians who passed through here, envelops us as if we were turning dishes on an invisible glass plate. The heat does not come from all sides, but in waves, in gusts that burn without warning. One minute you are fine, in the other, it is being cooked inside, as if the body could not decide if it is hot or cold. It is an unequal preparation that leaves some badly and others super cooked, depending on where they are and where they go.
At lunchtime, for those who can, relief is in the air -conditioned offices, but just one step away to feel the thermal shock of a . The hot air that comes out of the car engines, the pipes, the air conditioning generators in the diving in boiling oil without any ceremony. And so we spend the day, between the frying of the streets and the freezing of the closed environments. The crust forms fast: red noses, rough hands, cracked lips.
Inside, however, there is still a little heat, a resistance that keeps us moving, even if it is just for a hot coffee or a thicker coat. You get sick, go to the post and the general practitioner who meets concludes: it’s virus. There I go from Dipyrone, a medicine that apparently heals anything. It is prescribed as the miraculous teas of herbs from any inland healer.
At night the heat should give respite, only not. The buildings continue to radiate everything that accumulated during the day, like a that has just been turned off. Hot concrete bakes slowly, cooking exhausted bodies that try to sleep. The city does not refrain, does not cool, does not breathe. The process is slow, almost cruel, but uniform. Everyone suffers equally, either at the bus stop, in the market line or in the standing traffic. The urban oven does not distinguish cuts: rich, poor, young, elderly – all end up becoming juicy but exhausted.
And so we follow, overnight, sauteed, grilled, roasted, toasted. Like forgotten foods in an environment that was not made for us. The city, nothing resilient, was not made to house us, but to transform us. Baked, fried, boiled or dry, we are the main course of a menu we have not chosen. It remains to be known: When will anyone turn off the fire?
*This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the young Pan.
