The Sensual Ache of May

On Heat, Hunger, and the Longing for Wetness

In the swelter of May, when the air is thick and the earth begins to crack beneath the sun’s relentless gaze, a deep, almost primal longing stirs—for wetness, for relief, for something to soften the edges. The heat coaxes sweat from the skin like a confession, and with it rises a thirst that is more than physical, a yearning for the touch of water, of rain, of anything that might cool what has grown too much to bear. This longing is literal, yes, for the quenching balm of moisture, but also metaphorical: for tenderness in a parched season, for intimacy in a time of dryness, for the kind of presence that soaks into the soul the way rain soaks into drought-hardened soil. May makes us ache, not just for shade, but for saturation.

Today, I share two pieces of writing about the heat and the longing for wetness. I invite you to share some words about the month of May, where you live, or a season of intensifying heat in your life in the comments below.

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An excerpt from my diary in May 2024, written on the mountain where I live in Jalisco, Mexico.

The wind is picking up as if blowing the last of this fiery May heat away before the rains fall on this earth, thirsty for water. At this time of year, where I live, everything is covered in a fine silt of “polvo,” a layer of dust ground down from the deadness of the drying-out world. We all hunger for relief from this oppressive heat that clings to the skin like a cloak of honey, sticky and unbearable. The end of the dry season is a test of our limits, and we have almost made it to the wetness, to the fertility of the earth birthing itself into flowers, mushy ripe mangoes falling from the trees, guava and lemon hanging from branches ready for the plucking. Soon, we will walk in our rain boots through pools of red clay, watch a theatre of thundering storms from the balcony and hide behind closed doors playing cards and drinking tequila.

A tree in El Tuito shot in May outside the cemetery

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Below, I constructed a poem from words in love letters that came as emails I exchanged with a Caribbean man with whom I fell in a deep, transcendent, epistolary love some years ago.

WET

i am wet

dragged into you

by currents so fierce

water all over

churning wet dripping

leaking wetter in you

dripping my sea at the thighs

the waist. my wine into you

i drip

my wetness

swirling the way

hurricane-fed seas churn

my fingers hardly contain the pen

too wet, flooding me

at the sound of your voice

trailing wet ink

over the floor, i am

enveloped in wetness,

from ink to the sea,

washed all over again

in your words.

Image of Preston made by author in Barbados

Journalling Prompt

In a season of dryness or overwhelm, where in your life do you long for wetness, softness, or relief?

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