fog for a decade (a microphotoessay)

I drive to the waterfront on a heavy morning in late October of 2019, a dense fog resting upon the vape shops and vacant facades of Barton East. As I made my way through the swollen valves of industry, gulls circled the giant ducts above. The city in blue, an empty sign. The bare lattice of infrastructure omnipresent. Bones hang above cars. There’s a grandeur; there are meat pies for sale and there are tanks and tankers. I went back and forth, passed through it every morning as if stalking the end of something I could not comprehend. 

We measure a thing to make it extant; to delimit, to chart dimensions, to draw a line in the intermingling chaos. I tried to frame it up so that i might better parcel time, to extract some meaning from its passage.

Is there a hidden mechanism therein? I need to build a memory for the future. I need a scaffolding.  I need to believe that a chain of core parts might somehow emerge.

I went there in my mind some time before quarantine was imposed in early March and I’ve stayed put. Have we spoiled the well for the last time? I’m tired. But I’m always tired when I first wake up.

What to make of all this?…Like you, I’m just an echo. We repeat. Who will be named? Repeated? I would prefer to be filed in the absence. 

Please.

There was a change in the light — December of 2016. Unseasonal, everything radiant with heat, eviscerated shadows. It was unsettling. The doors to a portal fell open. I took off my shoes and fixed my buttons.  

It was very foggy at first, before the sun burned through. Another link detached itself from the great chain. Images continued their self replication. The river flushed onward. What it felt like — I could never sum it up. Such was my feeling just prior to the pandemic.