I’m trying to make sense of the heat right now. I don’t want to stand out from the crowd and yell “Global Warming! Curse you and your kin, heathen!” without having a sense of something, like an answer. Basically, I know too little about Global Warming to start blaming it, but since I’m running out of answers (especially the more logical ones, like God forgetting to turn off the heater), I’m starting to give it the stink eye.

Whatever it is to blame, though; the weather now is baking. I say baking because if you place cake mixture in my living room right now and return next morning, you get a very lopsided cake baked close to edible. And pixies or gnomes have nothing to do with it.

It’s hot enough for me to wish for a genie so that I can wish for snow.

(Hot as it is, however, I sometimes get very blue skies. You can’t find it everywhere in KL now, because the haze has settled on most parts of the city, but Plaza Damas is lucky enough to have azure skies and cotton-white clouds. I suspect the residents there actually paid for it).

Baking hot weather is not all bad. For one, traffic seems to be smoother. Without rain to addle our minds and sending us into frantic confusion as to why water is falling from the sky, I haven’t been hitting heavy traffic for some time now. It’s good in that I get home with half the time and frustration. It’s not so good when I find myself having less time to think. Or daydream.

For two, the dogs dry up nice and quickly, after I bathe them.

For three, it feels like summer. And summer is what I really want happening right now.

I want summer.

You don’t ask for summer in Malaysia because you don’t get them (we’re tropical, which is like a mutated climate), but I want summer to happen, because it’ll be summer Somewhere.

Summer is nice, yes? 

Yesterday, I went up to the rooftop balcony, pulled the bench to the middle, and laid down on it. I let my hands become the pillow, and looked up at the sky.

It was a sky that was – as poets may put it – cerulean like the depths of sapphire. And as poets might’ve done, I stared at the passing clouds, to think and limn and ramify, as much as passing clouds would allow for thoughts and limning and ramifications. Like the clouds, they stayed only as solid as the winds would allow.

You fall into skies like that. You let it take you places, riding on the clouds and the winds. You trust it tell you something.

So I let go, and fell.

I was cheated 5 minutes later.

Because, in the end, the hard bench still hurt my back and the hands can only last as long as makeshift pillows over splintery wood. Discomfort can be a real anchor to reality, and sore arms are a reminder of that.

I was still thinking, though. The skies and the clouds made sure of that. And the winds that day, they were beautiful. They sang and they caressed.

You can try and think back, then. Reminisce bygone times, reconsider decisions, ask the What Ifs or the How It Would’ve Beens. You can try to recount the years and the months and the days and the seconds or retrace every footstep left on the Sands of Time. You can try all that, and you would’ve ended up back staring up at the azure sky and wonder how things had gotten there. And you may know, or tell yourself that you do, but once the clouds shift and the thoughts went with it, you’ll be back wondering.

Sometimes, we wonder enough to decide that the wondering itself is really the answer.

“Why are we here, mate?” “I wonder, buddy. I Wonder.”

I wonder.

But I’m really here, under the bluest skies this side of the world. I’m here and it’s a beautiful sky.

And all is good, even if the bench hurts. But it let me look up to the skies, like I was part of it.

It’s not perfect. But it’s good. Yeah.

And then the stairs-climbing dogs found me, and they do the only thing they’d do if they find a master lazing out on a garden bench placed on top of a rooftop balcony under the cerulean sky; they lick him until he had drool gelling up his hair. I had to feed them to appease them.

And that was that.

It’s not perfect, but the sky is. Always will be.