Something Beautiful, just beyond the Fog
Concrete sprawls through blankets of mist, pillowy suspended droplets basking the means forward in snowy hues. Droplets putter down, staining the pavement with their corpses. It drinks their blood and grows darker. It coats you in its entrails of an unknowable cocktail of cloudborn chemicals. Cracks tickle the road like veins, war scars of the vehicles who have stood on its back. The road rests now, though tufts of emerald fuzz burst through, dominating odds and re-earning their rightful oxygen from being submerged in a prison of tar.
Wrapped in leather, matted mud-coloured hair framing your vision, you stumble further into the unknown, the fog now thicker than milk. To inhale feels akin to drinking from this cruel landscape. It coats your throat, stifles your breath and leaves your skin uncomfortably amphibious, this unknowable cloud through which you travel. Almost home. You shiver, the crystalline blotches, the puddles in your boots, chomp your nerve-ends and sting them with granules of ice. You want to collapse, to dissolve as paper dropped in a pool, letting your ink spill out in an ominous blotch denoting your legacy. Yet you march. There’s something beautiful, somewhere beautiful just beyond the fog.
With vision bound in chains, worldly cataracts leading the way, life seems to have tapered off. Life is absent. The warm lamps of carpeted rooms, the fireplaces glinting off kettles, the comfort in running the back of your fingers across the pages of a book and the closeness of walls and bodies rolled into one by the amniotic yoke of layered duvets. The grass does not speak, nor does the breeze that pierces your jacket, plays your pores as woodwinds and makes residence in your lungs. It swirls and bellows, giddy to play, running laps around your mechanical advance. A pouch of grass disperses beneath your shoe, grinning verdantly under a clomped dispersion. If only an ounce of life would show itself to me, you think, then my heart could be at ease.
Something beautiful has passed you by as your thoughts find home where they are not, in reminiscence of space now so impossibly absent. Something so ugly contextualized into beauty. Something so mundane, so elementary in the construction of the familiar that it has grown absent. A crossing light has entered the bubble. It spews through the mist with its warm magma hand. The pole has been claimed with an ivy-like overgrowth of rust. Residue has built a village at its base, paint has long been claimed by stray episodes of decay. It seems so far out of commission in such isolation, yet it continues to illuminate this dire hour. If only I could place this pole, you think, if only I could place it near my home. Yet, in such limited sight, in such stunning mundanity, it is useless, so I trudge on.
Slowly, creepingly, the road warps to gravel. The veins flee off into the mist, like roaches fearing the divine uncertainty of what is to come. Yet you trudge on. The tar parts into rivulets dancing off into the mist. Yet you trudge on. Gravel begins to group under your feet, wooden beams pinned into the earth and winding steel run perpendicular, then parallel to you, then under you. Yet you trudge on. Through the fog, a horn bellows, pale lights glare down overhead like eyes of judgement making critical remarks of your sauntering scalp and sickly posture. You step carefully on the rotting wooden planks, allowing them full guidance over your path. Even guided chaos seems at this point more productive than wandering, than endless traffic lights at unique stages of collapse. All of civilization is now bathing in the milk, basking in it, all except you from where you stand. Why must I only see myself, must I only suffer alone, you think. Your heart is swelling with love, your stomach prepared for even a bland meal, your brain uncomfortably marinating in what it can’t have yet can so idly visualize. It visualizes something beautiful and you walk a little faster.
Eventually the tracks curl up, coiled and axed, the earth now as the flesh that sits beneath your fingernail. Contextless gravel that stings to the touch. The rain has lightened up, the fog offering slight reprieve from the pale blindness thus far afflicted. Despite the drying air, the moisture still rests heavily, bedded deeply under the skin of your attire, raindrops like ticks weighing down your coat and sapping your strength through the accumulation of imperceptible mass. You want to sleep, but there is no point of comfort. The gravel feels it has grown sharper. Perhaps you could go back and wait for the train to come. Perhaps, given the conditions of the rail, the train will never come. Perhaps there was never a train at all. You occupy yourself with possibilities, losing faith in the reality of the situation. In the absence of light, all has become mere forms, mere objects occupying spaces that are unfillable through such limited observable sense. Surely you had crossed by a train platform, you recall, placing a stone-brick wall in the corner of a vision you no longer held. Nonetheless you don’t turn back, for something beautiful does not lie in that that already was and has been.
But soon enough your patience was rewarded. The gravel trickled off, its sprinkling becoming more and more sparse until the soil billowed back to the surface from its pebbly prison. Jade knives, some with yellow hilts seemed to creep up from clumps in the mud, climbing slowly closer to your knees. There they ceased, dancing and tickling your soil-spattered trousers. Your eyes grew heavy, but the flora poked your fingers, reminding you of the odyssey you must undergo. You’d always been told nature was something beautiful, but you never felt it. It was always just there, sometimes intrusively so. Now, too, this marshy meadow was nothing more than an obstacle barrelling into the unknown. Maybe on a clear sunny day, something beautiful could be found here, your hands pillowing your head as the clouds passed by and bees droned overhead, on their own quests for beauty. You could almost hear the birds, feel the sun irradiate your skin, but now there was just the bellowing of grass, swaying left and right for what reason but their own lack of volition. If only grass, too, had a spine, so it could know more than this hypnotic sway. It could seek, voyage, build relationships. You never considered the vast privilege a spine had graced you with, and found some peace in that fact.
More and more flowers made themselves known with the courage to ascend from the menial grass. Arrogant things they were, vying for attention through their garishness. They lower themselves so deeply to earn the favour of the butterflies and bees that they become something they are not. The grass became a minority in the patch you now entered as more and more flowers called out, enraging you slightly. You felt bad stepping on flowers, unlike with the tall grass. You stepped more carefully, guiding yourself off of the linear path you had sworn yourself to, all for the mere presence of these arrogant things. Why couldn’t they be more like the grass? Humble, exact, uniformly itself. You looked back, smiling into the fog where the grass was, hoping it could see and respond to your cheeky wink. Grass sure is something beautiful, definitively absolute, so whole and complete. Flowers were made for someone else, someone shallower.
Again, the grass flourished and all felt a little more comfortable, a little more understandable, a little more traversable. It reminded you of your backyard, the nights spent together on the swinging bench, the sweating cans cleared to quench, the garden hose’s coordinated drench, but now you trot through mud and trench. A sigh, look down then look up. Another obstacle has made itself known. Orange bricks made pale by the air stack twice your height, thrice. Your gaze climbs higher and higher up the wall. Ivy, spreading cracks, crying windows, roosting birds, aluminum columns growing endlessly as bamboo into the clouds. The fog must have cleared a little, in fact it had, for you to be able to see this high. A factory all the way out here, huh? Beyond the smell of soil and mildew, another pungent smell competed for your sinuses. A chemical smell, like distant burning hair. You felt violated, ready to sit back there in the flowers to feel clean again.
You ponder what the factory must have been to produce such a wretched scent. You remember hearing about how every droplet of water on earth had been polluted with chemicals, suddenly conscious of the coating on your skin, deeply disturbed at how it may be seeping in, your skin thirstily leeching in these putrid ungodly substances. You look up again and shutter. Up at the chimneys, which by the fog, seemed still to be pumping gases into the air. A cloud factory, you thought. This factory made those evil clouds that corrupted our precious water. You imagined, on a clearer day, titanic masses of cotton gas exploding, creepily climbing out of those chimneys. Perhaps this fog, too, was a result of this conniving fortress of brick. Someone inside wants me dead. They weigh down my cloth, they cover my eyes, they mask the beautiful things in the world leaving only these instances, these snapshots, of the world in all its complexities. Whoever is in there, you think, may believe they are protecting me, may be trying to tell me something, but I can’t help at this point but to wish for the only mist to be the steam above a piping cup of tea as I lounge around with those I love. You imagine the reprieve that would arise if only this rank mass would collapse in on itself, squishing that industrial marauder like an insect. You look up to the steaming columns once more, sigh, then kick the brick wall as hard as you can before tracing your path at a safe distance from it.
But here the brick stares and kicks back, peels away from an iron obelisk embedded messily between its teeth, mud sputters up its unshaved legs. You shiver, your teeth chatter, your nose is stuffed. The rain and air must have been intermingling with the miasmic ailments. Your hand closes around its handle. A disgusting intimacy as the rod saps the remaining heat from your moist, pallid skin. The abyss yawns behind the beast. It cranks, trickles, yearns. The smell of mildew and wet concrete pungently jab your sinus. You recoil but it calls, the safety of dry, dusty air from the downpour of cocktail poisons. The yelp of tetanus-fraught hinges squeal with the swallowing of sable air. At once bygone and uncertain hath beauty grown.
But cloud-coated sunbeams give the chamber a dash of gray-blue hues, grant soft pastel borders to rustbelt defunct titans of industry. Cranks and barrels lurch and trap you in their bulging steel. Each footstep contrasts between the flush of a puddle and the pittering of a rusted screw darting out of your way. The ceiling drums inconceivably high above, the precipitation forming a thunderous heartbeat to this Fordian corpse. The vacuums of proletariat organs yearn to be filled, to defibrillate the patina-blanketed automaton of product. But it rots, threatens collapse, drags you to Styx by its chthonic treads and motors. Its panels burst at the seams with dented decay, its exploded screws sit as vipers ready to sting your soles. At least the open sky is welcome. Perhaps the roof can enlighten your path home. A ladder clings to your outreached arm, your cane of flesh for deciphering the abyss. Ascend, it whispers. It promises beacons and unstuffed air, the phantasm of home or beauty amidst the decaying mist pillowing the roads. Something beautiful may soon be in sight.
One hand forces up a leaden latch. You thought your arm burdensome enough under the yoke of sopped leather, but the strength of volition, the will to beauty, grants you passage to the chain-link overpass. The weave of aluminum webbing, the gossamer threads supporting your life, creak with your squelched sock footsteps. You just want to go home. You just want some food in your stomach, the touch of another asking if you’re alright, a throat quenched by other than thick air. You imagine the shattered crunch as spikes of bone cleave your moist flesh, a crimson twirl vortex in the puddles beneath, the dissolution of your aching legs as you know it, the tense muscles snapping at once as rubber bands and fingers broken as stepped-on twigs. Young lungs betray you. These morbid images fill you with a sick sense of beauty. Your synapses bite you. You are ravaged by an itchy warmth that drags its claws up and down your appendages. You want to toss your coat asunder, blanket the cesspools and dust bunnies of the shadows below. Oh, to be back on the claustral floor, the safety of the groaning labyrinth, of no minotaur but placid steam. But the chipped-paint chains beckon you higher, higher, to a cracked skylight, where chunks of opaque glass peanut brittle whistle to slice you open. Rotted leaves shot as bullets by turbulent gusts into the steel bastille. You clung tight to a pipe at the catwalk's end, thickly-coated with condensed oil, and swung your legs cautiously through the shattered window onto the roof.
Outside, the fog fizzled and smoldered an evening orange. Avast, limpidity no better be known. No homely clays, plasters or woods beckon you from within the meadow’s bubbling cauldron. The setting sun flared through the fog, its light turning the deleterious weather into a haze of spray paint. Blues sunk beneath the coughing silos of aluminum and brick, while a coat of red mellowed atop. The skies a lovely lilac, seasoned with wisps of dark candyfloss. These sugary adversaries had devoured my path, had obscured the gifts of our solar marble, and had compelled me to a shivering malaise. You have a coughing fit and remove your limp, bedraggled coat. The rain has not stopped, gives you no reprieve, yet you succumb to its will. Let it spit and swallow you whole. The ceaseless clouds have granted you a new coat of icy dew, adorned you in their aquiferous furs. You fall to the bedstones that tarp the flat-top roof, succumbing against the cloud-makers chimney, your head nestles against your damp denim thighs.You run your fingers along the bags under your eyes, pinch your brow and sigh. A wry smile claims your face. Something beautiful may lie somewhere on the horizon, but no longer you tread. The fog has swallowed your home, the rain the warmth of your love. In spite of it all, the Sun blares, beams, warms, hugs you and welcomes you home. The sandman reaps your soul, your heart is plopped into a bath of warm milk, weakness trickles into each of your puppet joints. And what a beautiful journey home it was.