This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

The following iteration of The Parlour is how I initially envisioned this series: nascent essays oriented around themes but without much of a “point” or lesson to be learned. So let’s see how this goes!

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We’ve been under a heat advisory for a number of days, I couldn’t tell you exactly how many. They’ve melted together like the That’s It fruit bar I accidentally left in the backseat of the car, gone gummy and flacid. I’m writing this from Orlando, but I bet I could be writing it from other places, too, perhaps the place you are reading this from now, a place made hotter than usual by this midsummer heatwave sweeping the nation. That’s what it is: hotter than usual. Because Orlando summers are always hot. But this heat, it’s different. Ten degrees up from daily averages.

This heat advisory has collided with my preseason tennis training weeks. I’ve got league matches and tournaments coming up in September, and I made a promise to myself to train hard this summer, no matter the weather. There’s nothing I can do about rain, but heat I can push through, have to really. I watched a video recently where a tennis coach to the stars says the only way to prepare for playing in the heat is to play in the heat. He’s talking about touring professionals and in particular the way the record-breaking temperatures in London threw many players off at this year’s Wimbledon, where spectators kept passing out in the stands because it was so hot, halting play on the court. No one was used to the heat. The players, he reasoned, should have booked their practice court time for noon, not morning. They needed to get their bodies ready to play in extreme heat. I’m not a touring professional. It’d be a triumphant feat for me to get to Wimbledon just as a spectator. But I took his instruction to heart. I’m always doing this, applying advice for the pros to my amateur rec tennis life.

So I sign up for an advanced tennis clinic at 6 p.m. on a Monday. It’s supposed to be 94 degrees. I spend the day hydrating, eating well. Ever since I got home from a week in Portland, I’ve been doing this: hydrating, eating well. I’m not drinking. I’m in the gym training hard while summer storms churn outside. Drinking fruit-filled and protein-packed smoothies. Carbing up after cardio. Lifting heavy. Waking up fifteen minutes before sunrise because I’m working on a novel and two short stories and a long essay about my name and early morning hours are the only time I can find to actually do the work. But on the Monday before the two-hour tennis clinic under a heat advisory, I’m extra on top of taking care of my body. I want to set myself up for success. I drink electrolytes beforehand, prepare more to bring along. It won’t be enough.

Before I head out, my wife says don’t get heatstroke, and I’m sure we’re both thinking of the times in Vegas, during lockdown, when our only glimpse of the outside world was when we’d step out into desert mornings with frozen-through water bottles that became liquid in a matter of minutes. I craved those morning walks, needed them, but I also suffered under the scorching Nevada sun. I didn’t yet know how to care for my body in these extreme climate conditions.

🔥☀️🔥Recently, I sat around with a bunch of other writers, friends, and we discussed which natural disasters scared us the most. Our answers were predictable, largely hinging on the regions where we’ve lived the longest. The west coasters: earthquakes. Tsunamis as an aftereffect of earthquakes. The east coasters: floods and hurricanes. The Midwesterners: tornadoes. Me: all of it. I’ve lived many places.

🔥☀️🔥Tennis is brutal, right away. We’re only warming up, and I’m hot. The acquaintance who has been trying to get me to come to this class isn’t here. She texted me a few hours before to say she was skipping due to the heat. I recognize some of the others here: the husband of a woman I played a couple times on a flex league, a guy from the Sunday round robin I used to go to, a woman from that round robin, too, who is the kind of player I’m trying to be.

I’ve been playing in Portland all summer, so I’m re-acclimating to Florida! I tell the others when I need to break for water before they do. I’m always doing shit like this, trying to explain away weaknesses only perceived by myself. No one cares that I’m drinking water between drills. One of the coaches leading the session encourages it, tells me to break as many times as I need.

Seeing him here is a shock. A year and a half ago when I was just starting to get back into tennis, he was the only coach who took me and my goals seriously, didn’t condescend when I made it clear I wanted to be a shark of a rec player. He disappeared after a few weeks, ghosted me over text, and another player told me off-handedly he’d been caught blackmailing other pros. For what? I asked, and she could not tell me. I never fact-checked this absurd story. And now here he is, like he was never gone. Maybe he never had been as disappeared as I thought. Maybe he’s a mirage in the heat.

The Portland line is a bit of a lie. I hadn’t been playing in Portland “all summer.” Yes, it was true I was in Portland for almost the entire month of June and then returned for nine days in July for a writing conference, but I’d said it as if this were a regular occurrence for me, as if I “summered” in the pacific northwest, got out of the heat for a bit. God I wish. I only played tennis once, sometimes twice a week in Portland. Plus, the city experienced two separate heatwaves while I was there, so it wasn’t like I was playing in cooler conditions. There was no re-acclimating to do. Florida heat is already a hard thing to slough off.

But I wanted this, a legible excuse for why I needed more water breaks, why I was panting like the feral cat in the backyard we’d tried to offer water and treats to earlier in the day. Knowing I was already one of the weaker players that had shown up, I’d been trying to prove myself before the heat even settled into me like a possession. I should have been focusing more on my own game, on challenging myself. Instead, I was beating myself up for my body’s natural reaction to the heat, something so far out of my control.

Later, I reach out to the reappeared tennis coach to book a private lesson. He’s a blackmailer, and I’m a liar. We make a good fit.

🔥☀️🔥The only way to play well in the heat is to play in the heat. I feel less sure applying this logic to the simple fact of living in the heat. The only way to live well in the heat is to live in the heat? The only way to survive the heat is to live in it? None of these sound right.

Next summer will be hotter. The next, hotter still. No body should become acclimated to this.

After the clinic under heat advisory, I take a cold shower run by my wife. I ice roll my face. I played well, I think, given the heat. All this, given the heat.