The fictitious life that we allow ourselves on summer weekends

PalmaLife and I sign a pact of plausibility every summer. Weekends become a wonderful fiction and I, a very unreliable narrator. I tell myself that reality is what happens under this murky, whitish sky, so close the sun shines, and not the day-to-day illuminated by fluorescents. For 48 hours, it seems reasonable to follow the natural rhythm of things: waking up when sleep ends, honoring lunch by dedicating the time it deserves to be cooked and eaten, not leaving the house until it feels good, swimming if it's hot, and having dinner with the last rays of light. Days have no pretensions, hours don't want to last more than 60 minutes, time is what it is. And I believe it.

Summer has its own narrative, it is a genre in itself that requires the temporary suspension of truth. I embrace it with pleasure and immerse myself in this drowsiness as if just awakened, with a sleepy tongue, that lasts me all day. Summer routines require this: local anesthesia and that you offer no resistance. So I let myself go, imbued with a sensation that is neither sleep nor heat, but which thickens my head to the exact extent to be able to read, lying on the sand, a few consecutive pages of the book I brought to the beach. I have just enough mental performance to concentrate on one thing and not worry about anything else.

The days yield less of themselves and this is what makes summer weekends great. This is my favorite part of the lie: that you don't have to do anything with the dead time, that - in fact - you don't have to do anything at all. And that there is no guilt. I don't feel guilty for, even though I only slept for one hour, granting myself two hours of nap. Because the only thing expected of me is to do this: close the blinds, turn on the fan, and wait to digest or, which is the same, for it to be six in the afternoon and time to go out on the street again. And because perhaps the best thing that will happen to me today will be this pleasure of feeling clean skin in contact with fresh sheets and the contrast of wet hair, having passed through fresh water, on an ignited chest, burnt.

The important thing about this fiction is, above all, that we all interpret the characters. Simply, so that when leaving the room, still in the dark, still with our eyes closed, the routine of the house continues to be a lazy and calm ballad. Everyone follows the same choreography that, we don't know how, we have learned. Each subsequent step seems natural, as if no other could follow. "Would you like an ice cream?" someone asks, appropriately, without anyone expecting it. Not even the television, in the background, dares to contradict us. From various points in the territory they say it's hot, that it's very hot. For a moment, we decide to believe that this is only happening to us, to everyone, at the same time. That nothing else is happening in the world. And we let it burn on its own, for a while longer. The heat is our safe-conduct: it exempts us from thinking, doing, and saying anything. Like a mantra, we repeat it to ourselves, in the dim light of the room. As a sign of rest and repose, the towels still spread out on the balcony wave.

I think about the song by Facto Delafé y las flores azules that talks about summer and I'm already fantasizing about dinner, potato omelette and trempó, while swimming in the rocks. "We are calm, as if anesthetized / After the gazpacho we fall asleep / Watching the Tour de France / In the typical stage where Lance wins". Everything is pleasingly heavy like in this song: "We go upstairs, make love and sweat so much that we get dehydrated / Time stops, the air doesn't move / Mosquitoes flying and crickets singing / And you by my side dying of sleep / Tired, happy, you ask me for a story". Everything is exactly the same, even this: "But we don't care, today we will win the World Cup".

I don't care about anything. At home they said there's a match and the idea of incorporating it into today's schedule as the only goal that will make me look at the clock seduces me. Why not? Nothing gives me more pleasure in the luxury of having plenty of time than this. I don't care at all about football, but I love being able to afford two hours lost in front of the television. That and having an excuse to serve myself a cold beer and a bowl of potato chips with lemon and black pepper flavor. That and believing that life is also this fiction.