Fog over Jersey City

 

Thursday, October 30, 2014

 

The fog haunts this early morning like a dark stranger, sticking its fingers into the cracks of the rising day, fiddling with this or that, before moving away. I wake to the feeling that I am not yet awake, and can’t get my eyes to focus on anything, but those things nearest to me, my fingers fumbling to make coffee and to find my keys.

Every morning is a panic, even when there is no reason – the tick of clock, the struggle to loosen joints and find some level of consciousness. But on mornings like this, when there is fog inside me and out, I struggle most, trying to find that point where everything meets, and I can lay hold of reality – needing the crisp bite of coming cold to make it all feel real.

And yet, I want the fog to linger, to keep everything from becoming too vivid and too real, the starkness of a change of season when mystery ceases and we must come nose to nose with the inevitable, hearing the rise of voices of those long gone, hearing the thump of feet of those that come behind us, calling up the old Dylan song about not blocking up the doorway or else getting run over.

The fog hides all that, disguising the landscape, blocking out the huge towers that rise up like tombstones over this city I live in, markers that signify a new reality into which people like me do not fit – the shape of things to come as haunting as any dream monsters, the new mentality that does not have a place for me.

We live in a new era none of us expected to see, and one that have transformed the world as much as we did when we rose up so many years ago, and as we shoved aside our fathers, our sons shove us aside, reaching for something we could not grasp, and will likely they will not grasp either – illusions that even stark winter daylight can not make clear to us, and so I prefer the illusions of the fog where anything is still possible, where spirits of past, present and future mingle together, haunting but not so haunted as to abandon hope.