Friday, May 05, 2006

Veils of mist

Yesterday morning I woke up quite early, at 5 am since I started early working at my small extrajob. Anyway, yesterday morning it was extremely foggy outside at that time. And when I say extremely I literally mean a fog so thick you could hardly see more than five meters in front of you, and at best sort of like ten meters in front of you. It was pretty cool actually.

My job is on the other side the city though, and I have to cross the river that splits the city in half to get there. Fastest way over there, by bike, is to take a route over the largest bridge, that is located close to our home, cross that and take a detour when it comes across to the island that's in the middle of the river, take small forest road there through a small and nice villa community and then later over a tiny bridge and be back on track after a main road until i get to the working place.

So, I jump onto the bike, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and aim for the bridge. But as I start to ride out of the bike I have become enough awake to realise that it's dead silent. Just me on my bike. No cars or traffic, and I had seen no other soul at all up until then. And as I roll on out on the bridge I realise that I'm like a prisoner isolated in a small tiny seclusion inside the fog. It's as if the bridge itself appears out of nowhere as I push on forward, just as if it didn't exist prior to that. I'm starting to creep out as suddenly a undistinct shadow or shape starts to form in the mists in front of me. It makes no sound, no nothing. As it gets close enough it's obvious however that's it's a jogger out early exercising for some godforsaken unknown reason. But it's too late. During these few seconds my vivid imagination started to paint up Silent Hill references in my subconsicious and against my will I start to feel quite a bit unsettled. Bravely however I force my bike onwards over the bridge.

As I reach the island, I take the detour and aim for my shortcut, and soon enough I'm out on the small muddy road leading through the community here on the island. It's a few houses here and there, and at this time of day it could have been a ghost town for all I know. Devoid of all that's life. But there is not silence this time. No the silence has been replaced with this silently growing eerie highpitched irregular sound. A sound born from the darkest pits of hell. Truly. And as it grows in both volume and pitch I see another dark shape coming towards me, but this shape seems highly irregular in form, sways back and forth and closes in in a very high speed. I start to almost believe in the unknown at this point. But only almost. The sound is piercing through my ears as a man in somewhat 40+ scuttles past me on his rusty untrustworthy old bike, probably aiming for hiw own work most likely. At least the word scuttle is as close as I can describe it. The sound itself came from the crappy old bike.

And I must say I love fog. Despite how rational one usually are, it's a wonderful source of inspiration at times like this. Painting up the most vivid and vibrant concepts inside your head. I arrived at work very very tired, but in quite a good mood.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was thinking of Silent Hill all through this, and the last part made me think of the blaring siren and what happens afterwards.

I love fog too. Would be nice to get some real pea soupers sometime over here sometime.