It's 3:20am, and it's too warm to sleep.

Fiona is already asleep, luckily - she has work tomorrow. We've been having a heatwave during the past week, and 
it seems to have come to something of a head tonight.



The air feels highly viscous; there's no 
movement in it at all. Outside the window, the world is completely still. We had a brief but heavy 
downpour earlier, and everything is very misty. The sodium streetlights are at the centre of huge orange-black 
spheres of dusty light, all overlapping. There is no discernible sky, and the buildings are all abandoned sets on a 
deserted stage which they stopped building after they got three streets out from here in each direction.



It's unbelievably close. The air is just about <em>solid</em>, or so it seems. Even turning your head makes you 
sweat. Feels like I'm the only person awake for miles, though there's definitely a dreamlike quality to everything.



I've tried reading, but I'm too mentally tired and sluggish to continue. Tried playing snooker for a while, but 
the motivation isn't there - walking around the table is like being sentenced to wade endlessly through waist-high 
water. Tempted to go for a drive, especially with the other-worldly feel dwelling on the buildings outside, but 
I don't trust my alertness at the moment.



If I were to wake up in the morning and be told that this post had never actually been made, I wouldn't have any trouble 
believing it. If there are indeed times when the world of imagination, fantasy and nightmares collides with our everyday world, 
then surely this is such a time. Strange things might walk quietly, but comfortably, in the thick orange mist out there.



The whole world is heat soup, and morning seems impossibly remote.