Lying on the floor on a warm day

It's nothing short of ecstasy: surrendering to the geometry of a cool tiled floor on a hot day. The body, overheated and restless, discovers a sudden treaty with stone. The chill beneath rises, asserts, negotiates with each of your nerve-endings. You become both guest and conqueror of a surface stretched out like a map of relief.

The pleasure is supremely tactile. The floor offers up its stored coolness without ceremony to you, along with a delectable hardness. The skin translates this into a language of reprieve: hard frost against the spine, a reminder of how close 'coolness' can always be to you if you simply sprawl down.

Minutes dissolve into a kind of suspended clarity. The ceiling above becomes irrelevant, with the horizon now deeply horizontal. Heat outside presses like a crowd. But the floor insists on letting you be monastic.


On a hot day, this is not an escape but a close encounter of the closest kind - a meeting with matter that reminds us that bliss is lying there sprawled out where you stand or sit.