Quick! I need another Band-Aid.

A strange orange smear is on my thigh. The bottoms of my feet are almost chafed. My lips are stinging. It’s the heat. It makes you a little crazy, but just a little.

It is that awkward time of year, before you give in to the heat. You are still a fighter. It is the fighting that makes it so hard. You have to give in, and release control—just give it all up to the heat. By June you will be sitting in your air conditioning because you have accepted the heat. It is here until October. Nothing to be done. But, it is April, so instead you are not sitting in the air conditioning, and you are letting that heat inside your body.

Heat is anger and desire. Frustration and over-stimulation. It is rage, or orgasm. It is extremes—it is a little bit crazy.

I walked around my house this morning, in circles, just pacing. Laundry had managed to pile up, and various things throughout the house were in disorder, but I felt no constructive thoughts toward it all. Just irritation. The tot was walking around the living room with fire in her eyes. First she wanted to read, then she didn’t. She paced about her toys too, angrily muttering things in toddler language. The heat had both of us.

The nasty part is that generally you don't realize when the heat has you, you just think that everything in the world is an asshole. Or, depending on the moment, incredibly, wonderfully attractive. This was more of an asshole kind of moment though.

My neighbor called me because she suddenly needed a babysitter—I suspect the heat got her. I didn’t ask questions. My friend who lives in a small apartment called me and asked if I wanted to buy some chickens with her. Obviously, she was intimately acquainted with the heat. I didn’t ask questions. My husband emerged from his office, shirtless, and eyed me like I was a crazy person while I power-vacuumed the living room. I don’t know what was going on, but I suspect it was the heat. I didn’t ask questions.

The normally lazy dogs were standing at the windows, snarling like vicious beasts at every person that passed on the street. There was a squirrel scampering around in a haphazard way on the side of the house, until he settled at the gutter and chattered away, clearly experiencing the squirrel version of road-rage. The walls were closing in, and they were hot. I panicked. There is only one thing to do in those circumstances: go to the beach.

The children and I piled into the car. They immediately began arguing about whether or not a rooster is a male chicken. I was too irritable to pick sides. Then it was whether a hen is a female chicken. I was still too irritable to pick sides.

I blasted past the yachts cruising the inlet, away from the grandpas in the corvettes, around the man driving five under the speed limit with his surf boards hanging out the back. We touched already hot feet onto hot sand, arguing as we went. Then, I dipped one toe into cold water. It was as though steam had risen at that moment. I could practically hear the sizzle of a hot pan set underneath the tap.

I let out a slow breath. Everything is going to be fine. The thing is, the ocean is just a very make-shift Band-Aid. It is like a pirate guzzling rum before getting surgery for that new glass eye—it doesn’t really do much, it just takes the edge off. With the irrational heat still inside, the children and I decided to find the coquina caves, barefoot.

A bit of rock climbing on slippery algae with next to no clothing is a crash course in body control. “One foot at a time,” my voice said, over and over to the children. “Feel it out.”

Feel it out. That is what heat is all about. Feel the emotions, linger in them. React to them. Be irrational. The heat inspires soap operas. And husband’s to be shirtless when a wife gets home. Maybe the heat isn’t so bad.

My hair is stiff from salt still, like seaweed washed up on the beach, all wild and tangled. I’m sitting here with the ceiling fan going full blast, and just a bit of an evening breeze blowing in. It is too hot to roll the bed-sheets down. I am hot.

Quick! I need another Band-Aid.