The Weight of Ancient Breath

The air this morning tastes of damp wool and wet slate. It is a heavy, clinging cold that settles deep into the marrow of my bones, the kind of chill that makes you want to pull your shoulders toward your ears and disappear into the collar of a thick coat. I remember walking through a city built of dark, porous stone, where the walls seemed to sweat the history of a thousand winters. There is a specific silence that comes with thick mist—a muffled, velvet quiet that swallows the sound of your own footsteps until you feel as though you are walking through a dream. My skin prickles with the phantom dampness of that day, a reminder that we are merely guests passing through structures that have outlived our ancestors and will surely outlive our own fleeting warmth. If the stones could speak, would they tell us of the hands that stacked them, or would they simply hum with the vibration of the earth? How much of our own history are we leaving behind in the fog?

Mehmet Masum has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Castle of Diyarbakir under Fog. The way the stone meets the mist feels like a memory pressing against my palms. Does the weight of these ancient walls pull at your own sense of time?