After

Heatwaves injure by differential, not by degree, through the lag between what a system is tuned to sustain and what it is suddenly made to carry.

After a couple of days over 40 °C the city is quiet this morning, and not only because it is Sunday. Everything is settling back toward itself. Movement slows because capacity has thinned. Attention returns cautiously. Light above the footpath bends and wavers, heat still lifting off the ground as stored stress, not motion. The feeling is post-apocalyptic in a small, local sense, shutters half-down, sound muted, a careful re-entry into ordinary coordination, like the after-effects of a very bad hangover. What is being felt is not injury as such but phase lag. Bodies and streets are still responding to yesterday’s conditions. Suffering lives in that delay, in the mismatch between ecological memory and imposed conditions, where recovery has not yet caught up with exposure. Today asks only for slowness and psychological peace because the system is still dissipating load.

Beyond the street, the same logic scales. Incremental, effectively irreversible atmospheric modulation accumulates cost not as catastrophe but as attrition, through repeated deviation from the conditions our civilisational systems were organised around. The damage is carried forward, stored, deferred, redistributed, then felt later as fragility, irritability, loss of coherence. This trajectory has been misunderstood, then exploited, then normalised for commercial and political convenience. We remain here regardless, third rock from the sun, facing a theatre of cruelty and stupidity alongside the thermodynamic consequences of our own coordination systems. Continuity strains because the lag keeps widening. Coordination frays because recovery never quite completes. What remains is a fragile constellation held together by habit, fatigue, and the unresolved question of how much further differential can be absorbed before the system slips into a new, poorer equilibrium.