Seeing clearly through the fog
The night’s unsteady weather, with thunder in the distance but never drawing close, had stabilized considerably in time for the early morning hours and the day’s first wave of workers leaving the confines of their homes to make for more familiar surroundings.
Closing in on summer solstice, the city park was already fully illuminated, or rather would have been had it not been cloaked in fog. The city had seen fog with unusual frequency of late and of various character, as if the weather was showing off to someone what strange things it could do. On this particular morning it was white and smoke-like, and thickening towards the ground in reminiscence of some old stage-production horror film, or at least so Danny thought while making his way through it on his bicycle. Going slowly, to see where he was going, the mystique of it all would have made for a rather pleasant ride had it not also been unseasonably cold, made worse by the saturated wetness of the air.
As the wooded little hill to his right gradually revealed to him the full extent of its skyward reach, he half expected to find at its peak some central european castle with medieval towers and spires, but all there was, in the end, was the usual sight of the natural history museum with its once eye-catching architecture, in sixties or seventies modernism, and its, for every year smaller seeming, lookout-tower from where he had observed the city often enough while still in primary school.
Shortly after passing it, he came across his first fellow being since entering the park and … could it really be? Wouldn’t it be just too much of a peculiar coincidence at a time like this? A strange-looking man on a horse? Had he ever even seen a horse in the park before? And why hadn’t he heard it coming from far away? Surely the sound of hoofs battering the asphalt should travel fast and far through an all but empty early morning city park like that? But it wasn’t a man on a horse; it was simply, like himself, a man on a bicycle, although wearing a military green heavy duty looking rain poncho that covered himself and a sizeable part of the bike. Seeing as there was no current need for such a thing, Danny figured the man for probably being on his way home from working a night shift; having left for it the evening before, the cumbersome protective gear would have looked considerably less out of place, although not entirely.
The unnecessarily dry man’s failure to materialize on a horse, however, did little to mitigate Danny’s sense of the occult and he still half expected to see someone come walking through the fog dressed in Victorian clothing; in some ways, it would have been less unexpected than what he did, in fact, see next, for what he saw was … her, sitting on a bench with mainly her back towards him, and some way off in the fog, but still unmistakable. It could be none other, but what could she possibly be sitting there for, like that, on a morning like this, dressed in what appeared to be only a nightgown with an unbuttoned winter coat on top, as if she had gone straight up out of bed and out of the apartment.
How many years had it been since last he saw her? Yet lately rarely a day had gone by where he hadn’t thought of her, and of reaching out, and now he found her here, like that, on a morning like this where he already felt like absolutely anything was possible. Anyone with as much as the vaguest belief in signs from the universe could possibly…
Yet, in the end, though, he simply pedalled past her without as much as a greeting, having, in the last second, come see things also from her perspective; that which for him might seem magical and meant to be could very well, for her, be mightily inconvenient, if not, in fact, terrifying.
As much as he had thought of her lately, he might, in her world, be nothing more than some ex-boyfriend from a lifetime ago, if she even remembered him at all, and she seemed to be troubled enough without someone dropping in on her out of nowhere to demand her attention. As much as she appeared to be in need of a friend to talk to, he wasn’t it, and it wasn’t his place to.
