The Mist is an Embrace

The mist is an embrace.

Its cooling arms surround you, and the grass taps your skin with its pointed-tipped fingers. Your jeans, like a sponge, absorb the chilly dew, and the damp seeps into your bones as you lie there, looking up, up into the gray whiteness where uncertain shapes and irregular patterns are conceived and grow and dance and tire and lessen and disappear, but perhaps they never did at all. Perhaps they are simply imaginary children of your mind and your eyes, encouraged by the blank slate of thick earth-bound cloud all around you.

You breathe in, and the cool droplets of mist tickle your nose. A hearth fire smolders nearby. You smell the deep smoky scent as it wades through the fog to reach you, and now in the gray and the white you see an old stone cottage, squat little chimney puffing pillowy billows, a pie cooling in the window.

The sharp cry of a crow pierces the fog, and the cottage fades as a thick forest appears, twisted branches mingling with mystery, sparks of light flashing from behind clumps of leaves – fireflies, or fairies? – and you smile as they tease you with their little points of light at unpredictable intervals and locations.

The blades of grass poke at your skin, and the forest dissolves into a wide moor, stretched out before you, and purple with heather which rustles and sways in the breeze. A speck in the distance grows larger and becomes a horse at full gallop with a man on his back, and as they near you, you see that the horse is a rich chocolate and the man is clad in tall boots, breeches, long black coat, and he slows to canter, trot, walk, stop, and then raises his gloved hand to tip his brimmed hat as he parts his lips and smiles at you.

Now it is the gray whiteness once more, but the sigh that spills out from within you is one of contentment, for, be there or be there not cozy cottages or enchanted forests or gallant equestrians, there is that enthralling mist, gently covering you and holding you close. And you know that the one who, through the mists of time, imagined you into being is the one who now surrounds you with that embrace.