The Day

This weekend featured the day.

What is the day, you ask?

The day is the moment that summer ends in Dubai. The day you walk outside and the sun feels pleasant, not parching. The day you roll your car windows down and feel a breeze, not a blast of hair dryer-hot heat. The day the ocean feels like ocean, not soup. The day you can’t stop conferring with everyone you see, “Today’s the day, right?! Have you felt it? I think it’s finally here!”

We have two seasons here in the desert: awful (summer) and amazing (the other six months of the year). While the onset of the awful season is gradual and foreboding, amazing comes almost overnight, in the form of the day. One day you’re taking screen caps of “feels like 135F” weather reports and photos of eggs frying on the sidewalk, and the next day you’re rounding up your friends and happily lazing on the beach all afternoon, as we did on Saturday.

Most of all, the day is the day that you think to yourself: I am lucky to live here.