The Earthquake

It is so damn hot.

I took a shot of Listerine this morning; it was the temperature of hot tea. I leaned against my bedroom wall as I put on my shoes; it was as if I had put my hand to a heater. After washing my clothes, I hung them out to dry in the sun; it took less than an hour. Necio has spent the entire day laying on his back under my kitchen table. It is thirty-six degrees Celsius here. You do the math.

When it is this hot in my town, things start to slow down, like a walkman running out of batteries. Things get cancelled. Entire families lay on their tiled floors and sleep the day away. Stray dogs cower from the sun in patches of shade. Everyone acts as if they are stoned: their stride is a bit wobbly, thoughts don’t come out as clearly as they should, and all anybody wants to do is eat and watch TV.

It was in this sun-stroke state of mind that I found myself sitting on the corner of my bed this morning, a half-inch from my fan. I was hazily working on a lesson plan, while consistently drinking cool water. Then I felt something.

At first I thought that it was something as tame as Necio jumping onto the bed that made it move. I looked up from my work and found that I was alone in the room. My floor fan was wobbling, but aside from that, nothing was out of the ordinary. I felt dizzy, and I began to think that I was going crazy from heat-stroke or dehydration. But when it ended, I realized. I had just felt my first earthquake.

It was as if somebody had placed the foundation of my house on wheels, and let it drift around. My house was suddenly floating in the Pacific, and I felt sea-sick. Like my house, I had lost my mooring.

I went to the school to teach my English class a short while later. It was immediately clear to me that I wasn’t the only one who had lost my mooring; the students could not focus. Everyone sort of floated around the classroom, the way my house had floated around my property. We were there, but we weren’t. After class, I got home and fell into bed. I fell asleep in the middle of the day for the first time since college.

I was fascinated by my first earthquake experience. It was almost mystical the way a short vibration can affect one’s state of being. Like the quake shakes you into an orbit different than that of the earth. Maybe it shakes the reality from you.

Or maybe it is just too damn hot.