The Heat Won. We Accept This.

Ninety-four degrees at 4pm and the air felt like warm wet towel pressed against every surface of my body the second I stepped outside. Marcus, who grew up in Virginia and really should know better, opened the back door, stood there for a full three seconds, and said, I'm quoting, "it's not bad if you stand still."

The Heat Won. We Accept This.

We stood there anyway. I don't know why. Some collective impulse to prove to ourselves that we are still people who go outside, still people who have a backyard we use, still people who don't just rotate between the air-conditioned bedroom and the air-conditioned couch for three months straight. The deck was hot under our feet. Biscuit was completely horizontal in the one strip of shade near the fence, not even pretending to be interested in the tennis balls. Wise. Honestly, goals.

I've been doing my 5am runs before the sun has any opinions about things, which means I keep forgetting, every single afternoon, that it is genuinely dangerous out there. North Carolina July doesn't ease into it. It just arrives. And then it stays, heavy and personal, like a guest who didn't ask before showing up and has no plans to leave.

Adirondack chairs in July. Romantic in theory.

We eventually got ice water and sat in the Adirondack chairs for twenty minutes and talked about nothing in particular, whether to get the ceiling fan on the deck fixed before August, something Theo had said at breakfast about sauropod thermoregulation that was genuinely interesting, whether I thought Marcus's new leather keychain was going to survive my work bag (the answer is unclear but I moved it to the outside pocket so it has a fighting chance). Just two people sitting with the heat pressing down, not needing it to be anything else. Some days that's plenty.