Filling Up The Static: Hot

Filling Up The Static: Hot bread, humidity and Palm Springs’ A Collection of Songs

Written by Stella Theocharides

There’s no wifi here, so I ask my friend if you can over-knead dough. She fiddles with her camera settings while she tells me about airless bread, and I imagine dough, sitting in a pan, too familiar with my hands and breath to take shape or be eaten.

I am in a mountain creek with three friends in early January. Humidity is at 79 per cent. I want to float on my back, waiting for the UV to win against the sunscreen and burn my nose, but the creek has a strong, cold current that won’t let me sit still. When I hesitate, it tugs at my calves, pulling me downstream, and I have to splash around like a big wet dog to find my footing again.

Despite the sleepiness of the season, I haven’t slept well in weeks. Sometimes I suspect a body can register a heatwave and choose to give into it. Mine has started asking if it can walk around outside at night instead, when it won’t burn. It’s been tense. Everything is full of moisture and waiting to break. The only thing that cuts through the humidity is the creek, slicing past my knees now.

All summer, in one of many attempts to rest, I’ve been listening to Palm Springs’ A Collection of Songs. They’re too warm to send me to sleep, but they seem to draw me out of myself enough to permit a deep, slow breathing. I keep forgetting the CD is in the player, and when I turn it on again the next day, her fingerpicking begins without warning, disturbing the humidity of the room. Most of the time, I let it play.

The album art is orange, and the colour seems to hang in the air with the music. From the corner of the room a voice and a guitar diffuse, gathering stray feelings into songs that feel immediate and old, like they’re being written as they’re sung. I imagine them emerging whole and without pause, with enough air in them to rise. Earlier today, before the creek, we sat around a loaf of Turkish bread and ate it all with our hands. No one mentioned setting any aside: we were hungry, and it was hot, and restraint is rarely useful when it comes to what the body loves. One of my worse habits involves leaving bread for tomorrow and then waking up to stale bread. Things are good when they’re fresh.

When we turn off all the lights, I lie awake in the kind of dark where you can’t make out the windows or a hand above your head. Tiny bugs land on my phone screen and then dart away. My tongue is slightly burnt from peppermint tea. This time around January feels rich and open and wet, the weather and the year thickening in the air. I lean against the deep cool current, trying to forgive myself for hesitating while trying to learn a degree of healthy impatience. I listen to the house, invisible, and the creek rolling itself out like cool, steady dough. Rising. Making itself into something I can trust. Bread I can hold. Something that wants to carry me.

As my focus shifts between my friend’s breathing and the creek water, I feel orange and restful. Almost. Still, the moths landing quietly on my skin. Still, the humming of the months. I wonder if my fingers smell of bread, despite the creek. I doubt it.

I am far from the CD player in my room and the songs waiting in it, but I can hear them, an orange phantom limb in the back of the mind. Each year, I press play and am surprised again by chords and a voice I know. An album I’d forgotten was in there. A song I’ve heard before. And I know the tune.

I fall asleep expecting to wake early and let myself walk into the water; a gesture of goodwill, and of willingness. When I wake, it is raining, and I hesitate.