The Steam Room.
What I like about the steam room is that naked people voluntary sit together with harmony. Even though when people are quite silent (most time), you can hear the deep sighing, some are more euphonious than others; you feel someone's heartbeat and also yours, and the sound of steam pumping into the room is the only thing that reminds you the existing of air. I imagine this must be some of the other planets in the universe look like - a steam planet, where everyone has perfect skin, moist, warm, and bouncy.
I often sit in the steam room until I couldn't take it anymore, especially when I am about to getting a cold. Like this morning, I woke up with a sour throat, quickly packed up my gym clothes and ready for a long meditation. There are about five to ten men in the steam room, all wear white towels, smelled bleachy. I was mostly half-faint, my mind is definitely somewhere else while inhaling more hot steam than I should have, rapidly. I was visualizing the virus in my body fighting like an ancient Barbarian war. I thought about my life then, my photographs, noodle soups, my high school girlfriend who emailed me last night, and the man sitting next to me. He had leaned his body back and popped his rib cage, water drops sliced down from the surface of his oily hair.
When my brain might be near completely filled with steam, the war in my body is dying, all I can see is the white light, I convinced myself everything will be fine. As I stood up, towel re-wrapped on my waist, slowly moved to that semi-transparency door what makes me feeling like walking out of a light box. For just one or two second, I believed in Heaven.
Photos @ Shen Wei
