It’s my fourth day straight in the park. Marshmallow ice cream, then Solero, I couldn’t finish the new marshmallow-flavoured Twister, and today, one scoop banoffee, second of marshmallow but the banoffee is way too sweet.

Peeling off the grass stuck to the back of my legs. It’s like hay. Spiders make new freckles across the backs of my hands and then the freckles move. I’m not trying to make this text any good. It’s just a sign of life. I live in the shade now. Sometimes lie on my side, the trees at a right angle. I can see the horizon flickering. The burnt yellow ground is a candle.

A Scouse dad in a polo shirt walks past fast on the phone:

‘And I imagine, of his business, we’re only 5% or less. Correct?’

I cannot be in the house when it’s like this. Every room, every position, fan on or off, makes me sick. Heat’s the worst thing for POTS. Two weeks ago, I hadn’t got myself together in time and, I don’t know, the heat got cumulative. It was in the bricks. It’s different when the heat is uninterrupted, and when you live in a house built for a different climate, in a body like this. I couldn’t stop falling asleep without meaning to. It’s hard to describe how upsetting that is. And it’s like, all air conditioning units are sold out or £800, and I haven’t seen a working fountain in Liverpool since I was a kid.

So I am taking this siege to the park. Just need the air to be moving around. Need the air to come find me when I lie under these trees. The way it feels like taking a layer off and breathing out. I think there must be crickets walking tiny bikes alongside them under the grass because it sounds exactly like slowing turning gears. I didn’t bring a book with me. I haven’t got the head for that.

I have spent days watching these lads fishing. They are so young, like 13, and they never go on their phones. They barely move. Sometimes a bit of pacing, and occasionally one will shout to the other lad on the opposite side of the lake that there haven’t been any bites today and then they swap places. There’s old fishing line hanging from the trees above them and later on in the day, when the sun gets to the right angle in the sky, all the plastic starts to glint in the light.

I don’t mean to make this sound too nice. It’s like, I’m only eating the ice cream because the nausea is so constant I think I can trick myself into eating something. Two friends in new builds text me separately to say they can’t breathe. An Internet friend in Paris says it’s like the beginning of Covid over there between empty streets, full hospitals and continuous sirens. She says something about having to hang out in the bathroom. I’m in the north of England, I should be fine, but there’s grief for my old body and now grief for my old planet too.

40 degree summers are going to be normal by 2050. A climate activist inside a video on my phone is saying we shouldn’t each beg Argos for an air conditioning unit. We should solve these problems collectively. I don’t disagree but when they go on to describe new chimney technology that sucks hot air out of our houses like the mad head of a steam train, I already know my landlord isn’t going to go for that. I want to throw my phone in the lake. And I’ve been coughing all day because of the wild fires in North Wales. I want to throw myself in the lake. The lads could try to catch me.

Come day five, six and seven, the nausea wins out. An old man walks past with his calves out and I’m trying to work out what his tattoo says until I realise they are dark blue broken veins. School’s out and kids have signed shirts and water guns. There’s a toddler with his shirt off flying on an electric bike. The wheels are thicker than his legs.

On day eight, I have to wait in for a package before I go to the park. A friend told me about this film and maybe I remember it because England have just lost to Argentina, but I watch Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 film La ciénaga — the swamp. It’s hot in Argentina and two middle class families sweat in a rotting mansion. The car backs up into the hydrangeas. There’s a cow the size of a lorry stuck in the mud. The daughter likes the maid but the maid doesn’t like her back. The woman of the house smashes a wine glass and falls forward into the glass. It’s so hot, no one reacts. We go to the hospital in a power cut.

It’s this film where no one wipes the sweat off their face; where everyone is on the verge of giving up, dying, or lying down and never standing up again. Uncomfortable from beginning to end, like turning around to find someone far too close to you. And when it’s hot like this, I have no comic timing, or just no timing, and La ciénaga worked like that too — like the equivalent of trying to say something in a group but no one stopping to listen, and you try again a few times but it’s not happening. You feel like nothing you do will ever matter.

The postman knocks on the door and the sky above him is a different grey. He follows my eyes and tells me it’s going to rain. I go to the park anyway because I think that’s where I live now. The UV umbrella I’ve been carrying all week used for something other than the sun. The film is making me think of what it feels like to live in a country that thinks so highly of itself and yet: I cannot stay inside during winter when it’s too cold but the gas is too high, and now I can’t do the summers either. Hard to trust people with the money and the power and the working bodies will be able to turn this around.

The sky has put the candle out, and all the dogs in the park have wet black feet. A man asks me the time. I see two people I know. People I don’t know still smile and I want to say something nice to end this like, yes, something is being stitched back together. But I dread the next one. I can’t stand the fact other people are going to decide how sick I feel as the years go on. In that film about a middle class family going about their summer, the kids decide to shoot the cow that gets stuck in the mud.

🌞 if you’re here at the end of the text, comment a sun emoji 🌞 or something hotter 🔥 on our instagram so i know you stopped by

🌞 and don’t forget i started a new podcast called art dates first three episodes are out