We have learned to inhabit collapse: the apocalypse will find us looking at the horizon

PalmaIt's very hot. Suspended dust. Heat and humidity. Another plane crosses the sky, cloudy and heavy. Heat like from an exhaust pipe. The Tramuntana is not visible from afar. So hot that you can't go outside. The ring road at five in the afternoon. You can't even breathe. The highway, at the height of the airport, at any time. According to the forecast, tomorrow will be even hotter. Two girls are arrested; they say they had a banner at their home with the slogan 'SOS Residents'. Heat and anguish in the street: we don't know where to put ourselves. Gasoline is going up and yet everything burns: fire on earth and fire in the sky. Orange sunsets, beautiful as a bad omen, as a point of disaster. It's too hot: what if we take shelter from the fan? It's already the end of the month and we don't have money to spend either. Heat like a pressure cooker, as if about to suffocate us, as if about to make thunder.

So I'm going to the sea. Here everything has that tense calm of just before the world has to end, like a scene before the apocalypse. And I think that surely the end of the world will find us like this: with our hands on our hips and our arms akimbo, looking at the horizon, innocent and incredulous, as humans that we are. A warm, very thick air surrounds us. We get out of the water because, even so, it's cooler outside. The sea stirs and raises strange waves, which contradict each other, from left to right. The dogs bark. And a veil seems to have put out the sun forever. Everything is strange. It makes us feel deeply unwell. But we don't have the maturity we need to face reality.

For a while now, something hasn't been right. That it's true, that you can't stay here, that you can't live here. We've made a home in this discomfort, which is the only place we can inhabit. We've found our place there. We've squeezed ourselves in a bit more: we've added another lane to the highway, we've stopped going where we were going (in fact, we've stopped going anywhere other than home or work), we've swapped the car for public transport, we've installed air conditioning, we've made a list of the three or four restaurants that don't yet have their menu in English, we've emptied the city center, we've rented a house instead of buying it, we've rented a room instead of a house. It seems there's always a sliver of oxygen left in this cubicle they've left us.

However, this nausea always gives us a reprieve. The temperature drops a couple of degrees and we go back out into the street, as if the world were bearable again, as if an alternative were possible. Is it, possible? We don't face this part of the discomfort either, the one about thinking that going out into the street might also be useless. And, despite that, we do it. We drag our feet with the minimum energy we have left and the skepticism - or hope - of not knowing: not knowing if it's worth it. Tired faces, exhausted faces, long faces down to the asphalt that, precisely today, doesn't pant so much. And the agony of the fight sine die. Will we know, when defeat has reached us?

And in the midst of all this, seven levitating letters remind us why we are here: D-I-G-N-I-T-Y. I suppose that's the last thing we have left. Because we want more life and less of everything. Fewer ice cream parlors, fewer sunglasses stores and cheesecake shops, less plastic – fewer inflatable rafts, flip-flops, and portable fans –, fewer sailboats and fewer catamarans. And in front of all this, impassive, the song of La Balanguera. And against all this, pushing arms, clashing helmets, a hand raised, foam balls. “Forced to live in struggle”: it seemed like a premonition. Or a warning.

The next day everything seems like a nightmare: the Born promenade, people fleeing and tourists dining. Everything seems like the perverse version of a song by Antònia Font. Or perhaps Pere Andreo's verse was right and what has to happen is “to give a universal kiss and hit reset”. Collapse, dystopia, apocalypse: why do we only find science fiction words to define what is happening to us? The semantic field of reality has become too small for us. And it is also more comfortable to think that the day after tomorrow has not yet arrived; that we have a tomorrow left; and that the legacy is reversible. Because we have taken a breath: there were 70,000 of us and when I write this it is 27 degrees. We still have a reprieve before the final thunder. Meanwhile, as Júlia Colom says: “What my rage leaves me is what I can sing to you. Inside me there is a malaise and the song so that it does not grow”.