Sauna, Essentially

The sauna is just a room until you turn it on; then it becomes its most essential self. Until you feed hot rocks to the brazier and water to the rocks, it may as well be a church, its benches as solid and hard-backed as pews.

Once the heat takes over we worship only our bodies letting go. They too relax into their essences. You came in jacked up on posture and presentation, flexing and checking your reflection in the glass. Your body was a made thing, forged by whatever you consume and burn. You’ve been softened by beer, hardened by kettle bells. Your musculature is in a perpetual state of rip and regrowth; you are a product of the most careful calculations.

The sauna unmakes you. If I say it reduces you I mean only that it boils you down. I am talking about the intimacy of collective transpiration, the way our bodies sink and sigh against the cedar. You in your corner and me in mine, the glass door pushing open and closed and with it, bursts of cooler air, strangers coming in dry and leaving wet, the flickering of the inconstant light, these benches going damp and darkening beneath us.