It never stops. The problems never seem to leave me alone, they follow me around all day, from morning to evening, from sunrise to sunset. They have been doing so for a long time, but tonight is different. Now, they even follow me into my dreams.

I have been going to bed late for a while, not by choice, but because the heat in this city is unbearable. The warmth incapacitates my body and mind: everything seems slower, each minute longer, every movement heavier. There is yet another heatwave in Paris, one of those that used to be unusual but have come to seem normal, or at least familiar. The heat exhausts me. I am tired and need to sleep, but as I close my eyes, my heartbeat speeds up. A tingle runs through my arms into my fingers, as my chest tightens and my neck stiffens. I am not sure which came first, the feeling or the thought, but I know this: the problems have caught up with me. The breeze that was supposed to calm me down has triggered the alarm bell. The fan I cannot sleep without turbocharges my energy consumption, emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in yet more heat. Cooling my body down has its price: a cost probably first and most violently paid by somebody else, most likely somewhere in the Global South.