The Breath of Winter

The air tonight tastes of wet iron and damp wool. It is a heavy, clinging cold that settles deep into the marrow, the kind that makes your skin prickle with the sudden awareness of its own surface. I remember standing on a pier once, when the mist was so thick it felt like walking through a damp, gray velvet curtain. You lose the edges of your own body in weather like that; the world stops being a collection of solid things and becomes a soft, muffled hum. There is a strange comfort in being erased by the fog, in the way the dampness coats your eyelashes and turns the distant streetlamps into soft, bleeding bruises of light. It is a quiet, suffocating intimacy, a reminder that we are only ever as large as the space we can touch. When the world goes gray, does the silence finally have a shape we can hold against our chests?

Arnold Chan has captured this exact feeling of suspension in his photograph titled Extension. The way the light dissolves into the mist reminds me of that same damp, heavy air I once knew. Can you feel the chill rising from the water as you look at it?