We walked out of our buildings into the weather of the day. The morning sun fell through the thin morning clouds, and wove through the car fumes from the street. The heat of the sunlight thickened with the fumes and laid on us heavy, like a skin.

A feeling came upon us, a feeling born from the weather, and we matched the weather to ourselves and we matched ourselves to the weather. We walked past closed storefronts and kept our faces closed. We weren't open to each other yet, and our minds were full of sleep. We walked past parked cars and were passed by moving cars. We waited at intersections when the stoplights turned red, and all the things we had to do pushed up inside of our hearts.

The weather was strong and our lives felt small against it. But we were already locked into the progression of the day, and since this was all we knew, we kept walking. We walked until we reached the sign for the bus, and then we stood and waited there.

"Hot, isn't it?" we turned and asked each other.

The bus finally came, and we followed each other up the stairs. The air conditioner pulled the heat from our skin, as we slid our fare cards into the machine. We moved into the bus and found our seats. The driver was concealed by a partition, and he kept his solitude that way. He focused on his job of moving us forward as we set our minds against the day.

The bus erased the weather but our feeling of it lingered. We took our seats and turned to look outside. We knew how to live, but not why we lived this way. Time was passing, time had passed, and the storekeepers raised their gates. We looked out into the windows of the stores, at the clothes and the tvs and the vegetables there.

We tried to imagine our feeling into a small shape and then put it outside of ourselves. We'd read about this exercise in a magazine somewhere, but we never had time to complete it. The bus driver said "This is the last stop," and we knew it was time to get off. We were all forty minutes older from the time when we got on, and we walked down the stairs to the curb.

Back out on the street the sun gained its full strength, and the few morning clouds disappeared. The fumes from the street met the heat of the sun, and laid on us heavy, like a skin.

"Hot, isn't it?" we turned to ask each other.

It was almost too hot to move, but stopping would only make things worse, so we set off again into the day. We pushed against the weather as it tightened its grip, and with each step forward we leaned closer toward the ground.