In Suspension

This week I gradually came to understand that I had become unwell. It's odd because it has coincided with the weather: the meteorological kind and that of the psyche of those with like-minds.

The fog had been gathering all week, closing in slowly, like a gradual swelling of some enormous, damp lung. It was the kind of weather that seeped into a person’s skin, permeating layers until it touched the marrow, not quite cold, but heavy, suspended somewhere between mist and a soft rain that never seemed to fall. It felt like the world had slipped into a different gear, one meant only for hibernation or withdrawal, holding us all in a kind of watery stasis.

It was strange, the fog. It didn’t simply blur the world but blotted it, so that by the third day, sounds grew faint, muffled by the weight of air so dense it felt saturated with spores, with potential. A germinating fog. A place where, if you weren’t careful, some form of life might settle in you, growing undetected until it had wrapped itself tightly around your core.

On the edge of sleep, I felt this invisible growth pressing down on me, rooting me to the bed. I was awake, but not awake. My mind, suspended in thick liquid, thoughts sinking like stones into the murk, disappearing before I could reach them. My limbs, leaden and dull, seemed bound by some invisible force, a dense network of fungal roots that tangled around me in an organic straightjacket. It was the sensation of drowning while breathing, a sinister quiet that closed in tighter with each exhalation. And beyond my bed, the world itself had sunk into a kind of stupor—no colour, no music, only the fog that swallowed sound and held it close.

And in place of fireworks, in place of our usual annual defiance of nightfall, there was only the echo from far away, of a shift I couldn’t yet name. Instead of the riotous light, there was the aftermath of an election—another fog, of sorts, spreading its own invisible spores, seeping across borders, thickening in the air. I imagined it drifting in through the open window, mingling with the turbidity already here, thickening.