Hace Calor & Underwear's Evolution

It’s hot here and everywhere. The forecast for today is Fahrenheit of 104, and humidity of 75. 

Surrounded by air this fat, the leaves of trees look more like they’re underwater than caught in the current of a breeze.

A wasp floats by, a paraplegic hang glider whose legs got loose. 

When I was 9, I woke to a wasp at the threshold of my mouth, while his swarm made a nimbus of my nightlight.

It’s hot. 

In Spanish, “it’s hot” isn’t expressed as “está calor” it is said “hace calor”- translated in the literal to “makes hot.” 

I read a theory that “hace calor” is shortened from “Dios hace calor,” or “God makes it hot.” As a child, the abstraction of God was so hard to comprehend that I visualized him as a gigantic ice cube in the sky. If the theory of heat was true then this would be God’s suicide.

My brain is in a steam, and the smoke is coming on the air. Languid is all I can seem to muster. 

Anyway it’s hot, so I am wearing nothing but dresses, and dresses require underwear. 

My age is showing as of late. . . 

grey hairs transforming from streak to shade, 

empathy growing from language to sensation. 

But the evolution of underwear is a surprising sign of aging.

When I do wear panties, they are all lace. Often deep colors. Either thong or boy-short. Rarely bikini. Never cotton. 

The generations behind me eschew the markers of Victoria’s Secret, and choose instead our abandoned underwear. The undergarments of our grandmothers.

My panties are a paucity of polyamide, whereas theirs are a field of cotton, stretching from crease of thigh to curve of waist. It is glorious. These young women, so bold in their bodies. Extending their bellies in a proud stance of womanhood. The glamour of confidence concealed in fabric but not in falseness.

The intensity of cunnilingus is heightened when my panties are pulled to the side, instead of down. As if the one the tongue belongs to simply cannot spare an extra second before laying muscle to cunt. 

If I wore younger women’s underwear, would the top of my elastic band be slow-slid to reveal my bellybutton? 

A tongue skirting the start of my origin, the edge of my beginning. 

Bellybutton, cunt, and the geography of birth. 

I will forever tho aspire to a woman a quarter-century my senior, Sigourney Weaver. Wearing ill-fitting white cotton bikinis and fighting aliens with the cleave of cheeks exposed. 

But I will continue to choose the lace of my new elastic skin. The cutwork flesh of an ant farm. Because if my hair doesn’t give my age away, then my panties will.