The mist has turned everything into smoke. The heavy sky has sunk over the town like damp smog which muffles the day as a black cloud muffles the sun. From my window I see a ghost world rendered silent by this hanging graveyard fog. Trees are merely suggestions, possibilities, and the boats in the harbour stand fast like a scatter of frozen swans. No waves caress the murky beaches, no ripple breaks the flat slate surface.

 

A lone seagull is my only companion, huddled on a corrugated roof, boasting his bright chest against the dull seashore yellow of speckled lichen and rusted iron.

 

The day is a shadowscape, a smear of chalk which casts a melancholy haze over those petrified boats and my rooftop gull. This secret mist has whispered death to bright ruddy day which now breathes so softly that one takes it for a corpse. Half lit like a hovel, smudged by grey mystery and suffocated with opaque silence, the day has become a fleeting apparition, a soporific horror which lulls my wits to sleep like a tired animal retreating to its home of warm earth. Here, deep within my lair, my thoughts are stilled and my feelings flow with lucid ease.

 

Yet though the gloom has merged with the sea and muted the outlines of the visible world, I cannot help but feel a rush of raw clear colour and a throb of green life which fills my stomach with the sweetness of all things, the flavour of reality and the joy of simple misery. Suddenly, sitting alone in this half light, sadly watching those boats in the harbour and the lone gull on the rusted roof, I feel alive. And from this sudden feeling of aliveness come these words, which fall onto the page like the heavy shining drops, of today’s April mist.