Mist entry for 8/21/10
Droplets suspended in the air, a vague greyness surrounding the outsides of everything, dew-ing up the skin, condensing in the hair to make curls, making everything damp.
I’ve lived in sea towns before, and having mist in the morning that burns off by noon is a perfect pleasure. Who needs to see anything before midday?
When things are misty, the mist obscures so much that we might start imagining things that exist in it, outside of the familiar…an amazing friend, the gift that you really need, a perfect new game and the people to play it with, the remedy for everything, it’s all there in the mist.
“Misty” is one of my favorite jazz standards, both because the melody is so haunting and the sentiments so all-possessing. It’s about an upwelling of emotion, about having discovered the perfect someone: “I’m too misty, and too much in love.” And being overfull of something is the perfect state to be in, because then you definitely have enough to share. Misty, like maybe the earth is having an upwelling of emotion, a supersaturated feeling of connection.
I just looked up mist on Wikipedia--apparently these supersaturated upwellings need to be called fog if the visibility is a certain level of bad, and merely mist when you can see a little better. I can see my path a little better, which is why I love the mist.