Recommended Posts
Hottest January I Can Recall...
6 comments
Quite honestly, I never thought I would write about heat in January as anything other than a passing complaint, the kind you forget once the day moves on. This year refuses to be forgettable. Since the last days of December 2025, San Diego Venezuela has been wrapped in a warmth that feels misplaced, like furniture dragged into the wrong room. January usually brings a pause here, a subtle kindness in the air, cooler mornings, breezes that move through open windows and make the nights easier. Instead, this January arrived already overheated, carrying the same dense atmosphere day after day. Even after sunset, when the sky darkens earlier because winter insists on shorter days, the temperature stays above thirty three degrees. The humidity climbs without mercy, eighty or ninety percent, enough to make the air feel thick and uncooperative. It is exhausting in a quiet way, the kind that does not announce itself but settles into your body and stays.
Every day follows a similar rhythm, and that repetition is what makes it unsettling. I wake up warm. Not cozy, not gently tempered, but already aware of the heat waiting outside the bedroom. Fans do what they can, moving air without changing its nature. By midmorning the sun is not aggressive, yet the warmth persists, detached from logic. Nights stretch longer, darker, yet they offer no relief. At six or seven in the evening, when I expect some softness, the temperature remains stubbornly high. Sleep becomes fragmented. I wake up more than usual, aware of my own breathing, aware of the stillness. This is not a single hot afternoon or a brief anomaly. It is a sequence of days that stack on top of each other until the sensation becomes physical memory.
Searching for explanations felt inevitable. I checked the weather compulsively, more out of habit than hope, watching the numbers refresh without telling me anything new. Forecasts report heat and humidity and move on. No context, no narrative, no attempt to explain why winter feels like it skipped town. I considered familiar theories. Saharan dust often makes its way here around this time of year, altering skies and temperatures, but the signs were missing. The air looked clear, pale, almost tired. Eventually my thoughts circled back to climate change, not dramatically, not with certainty, but with the dull recognition that this might be another quiet symptom. I am not an expert. I do not pretend to understand the full scope of it. Still, it is hard to ignore the feeling that the planet is rearranging itself while we argue over whether the furniture ever belonged there in the first place.
Human behavior shifts under this kind of sustained heat. People walk slower, linger less, speak with shorter patience. Errands get done earlier in the day, if they get done at all. Afternoons feel suspended, heavy, almost static. I notice it in myself most clearly. My energy dips sooner. Concentration scatters. Thoughts drift back to how January used to feel, to those cooler evenings that signaled rest rather than endurance. Memory plays tricks, of course, smoothing out discomforts and exaggerating relief, but this contrast feels too sharp to ignore. The heat does not feel like an exception anymore. It feels like a baseline quietly redefining what is normal.
By the time I sit down to write this, days have blurred into one another, each marked by the same sensation of warmth clinging to skin and walls alike. This is not a warning or a conclusion. It is closer to a personal record, a way of saying this is how the year began, with winter failing to perform its role. I do not know what February will bring, or whether this heat will eventually loosen its grip. What I do know is that January 2026 has already altered my sense of seasons. It has introduced a subtle unease, the suspicion that this is not a fluke but a preview. Writing it down feels necessary, not to explain it away, but to acknowledge it honestly, from inside the heat itself.
Comments