My Heart Becomes Ice Cream
三島和希
Kazuki Mishima

I have an apartment in Astoria with huge windows. All anybody who has seen the inside of my apartment can say is that it must be nice to have so much natural light and that it’s good for someone who gets like I do sometimes to have a lot of sunlight. What none of these people realize is that sometimes, during the summer dusk, the sun does something very terrible. It shines kind of sideways against the walls and the dusty couch, and it shines so brightly that the light fills all the corners and the edges, so I can see parts of my apartment that are usually filled with shadow. I start to feel like I’m in an oven or something, but I’m not really hot, I’m just trapped there while the light shines through me and carries a million little particles of me out of my body into the room where they form the dust that shoots up in little clouds when people sit on my couch. Sometimes the light is so bright that it spreads beyond the corners and the edges and exposes not only the stuff that was hidden by shadows, but the stuff that was hidden by time, too, and I can look into the corners and see ten, twenty, or thirty years back. Then I start feeling really down, and I don’t know why, except that it has something to do with the light in those corners.

I was eating lunch in my kitchen today and I knew by the way the sunlight was slanting already that I would feel like that soon, so I ran outside and caught the N train heading downtown. The moment I sat down on the train, a woman sitting on the other side started playing this whistle thing with a tube attached to a little keyboard, and she started singing too. In my memory she seems to be playing the whistle-keyboard thing and singing at the same time, but she couldn’t have done that because that’s impossible. But anyway, her voice was really raspy and she was singing in Spanish and I actually remember the chorus of the song: “Cuando tu sol está en mi cielo, mi corrazón se transforma en hielo.” When your sun is in my sky, my heart becomes hielo. I couldn't really remember what hielo meant for sure, but I thought maybe it was ice cream, and I imagined my heart turning into ice cream and melting in my chest.

I was planning to exit at Union Square and visit the Strand, but I wasn't paying attention to the stops and we were leaving the Union Square station before I realized we were there. I didn't get out at the next stop or at Canal Street where the raspy-voiced singer stepped out. I passed under the East River and let Brooklyn pass me by. And at the end of the line, at Coney Island, I took off my socks and shoes and walked into the breakers, almost forgetting the wallet and the cell phone in the pockets of my shorts.

I turned away; I had been staring into one of those corners again. Sometimes, when the sun sends its light raking sideways across the ward I look into corners and see ten, twenty, or thirty years forward, when I live in an apartment in Astoria with huge windows and I only get shocked when I forget to take my finger out of the way while plugging in a toaster. When my doctor asked me why I traced the route of the N train with my finger on a pocket map, I told him I was getting ready.