What Weather Is
On the balcony opposite, straggling flowers, left for dead after months of near-claustrophobic care – watering twice a day, gentle whispering (they hated that; never wanted to know what the woman was thinking), plucking (humiliating human preoccupation with tidiness) are thrown into diagonal lines by the wind. The day is fair with floating, torn clouds, but the wind is just as vicious as it was last night, mid-storm – as lashing in the brightness now as it was in the wet.
I abhor biking in the rain but I got stuck in it yesterday. I tried to summon a feeling of triumphant heroism, man vs. nature; the glory of the storm, etc. but I just felt grumpy and aggrieved. Someone once told me about an island with relentless high winds, whose inhabitants are plagued by unease and a sense of futility. The constant gusty battering, the howling in your ears, the rattling palms. (For all I know, the island might be in Newfoundland, with rattling cranberry bushes, but I like the idea of a magnificent tropical island, a would-be Eden but for its unbearable breezes.)
Living in Singapore for four years in high school has left me with a skewed sense of what weather is. Singapore is a tropical island terrified of its own tropical weather; the persistent winds there are the whine and whistle of air conditioning, like an ineffective ice age, always threatening, never moving beyond the buildings’ sliding doors. Outside, the heat slaps you upside the head and the dizzy sensation that results is not a bad one. In the Botanic Gardens, midday, there are no shrieking winds, but rather screaming insects, arguing back and forth like drunk neighbors fighting after a night out.
The psychological effect of four years in Singapore, which is to say, four years of autumn and winter erased, is that part of you stops believing in seasons. And there is still a sliver of doubt in my mind at the seasonal changes in temperate climates. It seems like an elaborate sleight of hand, expensive visual effects, when the reality is simply throbbing, unchanging summer.
Or perhaps it is just the deep certainty that you never move away from a place; that, looking out at the balcony opposite, at the tortured flowers wishing they were under snow already, I know that I am also in Singapore, looking out at spilling bougainvilliea, lazy, decadent, and bawdy in its easy immortality.
One of my favorite songs when I living in Singapore as a teenager was “California Dreaming,” a song about missing warmth. But the reason I loved the song then was for its perfect evocation of winter melancholy, the aching blanket we wrap ourselves in until spring. I missed the missing. Wrapped in fall melancholy today, despite the showy brilliance outside, I choose 30 degrees Celsius, lethargy in my limbs, the light smell of gardenia flattened by afternoon heat, waiting for night to fall so it can perfume the empty sidewalks.
