Containment

The fog is a pressure chamber into which you plunge headlong. There's the mystery and the mystery of things left unsaid. The fog is a destination. Outside there's this cool summer day and then there's the fog, a welt on the land, gray, a pustule to be filled with brooding if you so choose. The fog's characteristics are quite plain: to be filled by your mood. The fog is filled now with something somber, something like the book I'm reading. I should stop reading this book as it's depressing me in a strange way, but then I can't quite put it down and want to get through it hoping that by the time I do the sun will have burned a pin sized hole through the fog on the spot where I'm sitting by the window where half my body is cold from exposure and the half that is resting against the leather of my reading chair is warm. I'm feeling a little like mercury racing through the pages of Observatory Mansions, but this flight isn't heraldic, I'm not bringing Zeus any lightning bolts from Vulcan, I'm sitting and have decided to make a cup of tea. I'm no longer sitting in my chair, I've moved, and the tea will help warm me from the inside and ease the scratch in the back of my throat. The scratch is deeper than the soft pink skin of my esophagus and extends into something like my spine. My spine is a conduit that radiates memories to all parts of my body. I'm remembering my time abroad which has already started to become a kind of dream. My body is remembering my time abroad and the scratch and the cough are reminders that death in dreams can be similar to the death of dreams and that each has a toll in the real world. My spine is reminding me that there's a place and time for things and that fog brings them to bear on my consciousness. My spine feels fatigue in the form of weight; when the limbs of my body, the matter of my person, and the fact that weight is a measure of gravity, when the gravity of the fog being filled with memories and things is weighing down on my limbs, and they are tugged from below by the nature of things, this is when I know that my fatigue is two sided, twice the burden, twice to bear things born once. This is the nature of fog, sitting in it, keeping it out by closing a window that has never kept it out, that never closes that wills itself open even when you know you never closed it, because the act of closure is a dogged one. This is how fog creeps into everything, every little space, a crevice of uncertainty. The fog is a reminder that every black and white construct can make a gray area, this is a place where choices don't have to be made but one can sit with one's own thoughts for a spell, relics borrowed from the fog and due to be returned once they've been processed and addressed. This too is a kind of fog...