of mist and sunlight

A thought I had today.

 I keep having this dream that you find your way home. It's foolish, I know--wherever you are, it must be better than here, this mist-choked waste that was once the heartland of an empire where we all lived complacent in the pleasant delusion that this was what the world should be. And even if you wanted to return, how could you navigate this cloying veil that stretches on forever?

In the dream, your face no longer mirrors mine, as it once did. You have grown thinner, the lines of your face have become sharper and more gaunt, and the countless roads you've walked under the desert sun have darkened your skin and bleached your hair. You carry scars whose stories I do not know, and there are lines of care in your eyes I do not recognize. You stand differently, your smile is different, your clothes are unfamiliar. And I wonder, because I am so used to using you as a mirror, to seeing the world through your eyes, what I must look like. Have I grown pale in this sunless land? Have the lines of my face softened? Has the smile I once spent so long practicing changed, become something strange and haunted?

I have haunted these mists for too long, now. The city where we once lived is gone, drowned in the ocean, and a fog rolled in from that cursed place and smothered the land, and with it smothered the dreams of . . . is it everyone? I have tried to find the edges but everywhere I go the mist stretches on forever. And around us everything begins a slow slide into decay, as this strange twilight in which we all find ourselves trapped erodes our will to do anything but lie down and wait for the end. I wonder sometimes if I am alone in still having the drive to carry on, the hope that one day I will see the sun again. I wonder sometimes if I still have that drive at all.

It's the thought of finding you again that keeps that hope alive, even if I can't face you, even in dreams. I promised once that no matter what happened, I would be there to understand you, that you would never be completely alone in this world, but you stand before me in dreams, changed in a way which I may never understand. And I, coward that I am, cannot apologize, because then you would forgive me, and then my heart would finally break.

So instead I ask you about the sun. And you tell me about hot days in those desert highlands, about smoke and winds and unbearable heat, and for a moment I can close my eyes and feel the warmth of the sun and the scouring of the wind and imagine that there is still light in this world. So I continue, searching the mists, and, despite everything, allow myself to hope.