A friend posted this song yesterday, which I had never heard before, but it immediately sent me hurtling back to winters in Pittsburgh, perpetual clouds and freezing and thawing gutters and afternoons that never turned bright or warm. Nostalgia for worlds I couldn’t touch.
My life then was lived in shades of gray: deposits of silver oxidizing in soft, heavy paper under the orange lamp of the dark room at MCG, stone buildings impregnated with decades of industrial soot, the muted poetry of trains and bridges and abandoned millworks. Dull flourescent light pushing along a day at high school, and freezing mists that weren’t quite rain and weren’t quite snow–just cold and wet.
I write this looking out over the San Francisco Bay, where the delicate span of the Golden Gate Bridge seems to hold the promise of an endless beyond of blue, and blue, and blue, and after that, everything. Worlds packed tightly together like commuters in a rush hour train, so close you can smell the wool of their coats and hear the music in their headphones.
Tall stands of redwoods shimmer in the sunlight, and I find myself wishing for fog.
