Fog

two meandering stories about children, women, loons, and water

When I pass from this form, I’m going to come back as fog. I want to coat the entire landscape in mystery and make people pause to think as soon as they wake up, well that’s a dense fog.

I hope they’ll consider their proximity to the nearest body of water, to remember what it was like to be eight again sitting in a classroom when they first learned that water evaporates, collects in the sky, and takes new form—just like me now, having recently had a body, but becoming air. As I’m stretching over the houses of the people I love, I’ll be so happy that I might move quickly and settle near a darker surfaces like pine trees or dark painted walls so they can notice my particles and feel changed somehow. Children will see me immediately and call their parents to see the big drops of fog near the pine tree. The adults won’t be too busy or distracted and will gladly listen to the kids for once. Then I’ll watch as they all gather inside of me to notice in detail how I am all around them. I’ll grow thick and dense so they can play together and pretend they’re actually lost by shouting their names into me and I’ll carry the names inside of my watery air to the nearest person, which will delight me so much I’ll do a little foggy quiver and unintentionally suck myself up into one huge drop that will then be too heavy to float so I will simply have to fall down! This will cause a great mystery and everyone who is there will look up, now able to see each other on a suddenly clear day. All of them too stunned to speak, holding awe in their hearts and wearing it on their faces as they stand in a shallow puddle wondering what in the world just happened.

When I pass, I will come back as fog on a shoreline, dense, but working together with the very Sun herself who will filter through me in such a way that two swimmers will be able to look at the hot circle in the sky because I’ll be a generous optical shield. Prone to crying together during the honest and vulnerable conversations they have in the water, the friends will marvel appropriately at the perfectly bright, round and shielded sun through my veil. Can you believe this? one will say about me. A loon will emerge from the cold Atlantic, but it will look different than a typical loon. This looks just like a loon, they will say, but the feathers are lighter and the eyes are not red, they’ll say. Then they’ll get quiet and notice everything come alive around them: the illuminated underbelly of a seagull flying overhead, the water trickling beneath the snow back into the sea where the water ends, the prints of a fox on the snowy sand, a nearby shelf of ice. They will not remember what they were crying about. Do you suppose that’s a loon in a different form? One will say. It has to be. I’ve never seen a bird like this other than a loon, the other will say. That will be that. They will decide right then and there beneath the bending light of the Sun shielded by me, the Fog, to trust their own hunch and that a loon is still a loon even if it’s floating in the ocean and not in a lake.

Trusting oneself always feels great, so the swimmers now feel better about…well, everything. This change connects us even further because if you’ll remember, I too have taken a new form. If a loon can be tan instead of black, a woman who loves the world can be fog instead of human. To connect these threads of thought (the loon, the fog, and me) will feel so profound that I won’t be able to help myself. Right then and there, I will suck every particle of watery air into one burst of liquid too heavy to float, fall from the sky, and plop loudly into the ocean right next to the friends. This will alarm them so much that, in thinking I was a very large fish, they’ll leap to land laughing together.