Air is a word that tastes rough. Swallowing too much air is similar to gulping small frictions. Like the balloon just popped lay limp, clinging in my throat.
But in the morning it’s all the way different. The air is filled with mist. The rising temperature or sunlights would have driven them away, so they only appear in that deep grayish blue, slightly unhealthy cement white. That sometimes reminds me of glass globe ornaments in Christmas. One single shake sends the tiny chips swirling to fill the entire sphere, like powders, glittering.
It’s like mists at dawn. Drifting lazily between the dim sky and newly spruced earth, rise and fall with invisible currents. Until sunlight has fully saturated the air, they idly cling to some speck of duct like the glittering powder inside the glass globe, settling away.
The cycling to school is a gap, a gap for solitude. Sometimes I feel that each person is a bubble. When we brush past each other, the walls of bubbles carefully compress to not burst. It’s also when I, every morning get to enjoy cycling alone in the dawn mists. People talk about the “foggy feeling,” using it to describe something vague, detached, as watching across the shore. But for me, these mists feel real. Tangible, reachable. Think of fog. It doesn’t separate anything. It simply follows its own likes, quietly falls upon everything, making you feel as if it was a puff released by the earth or the clouds.
I weave through a dense cluster of bubbles. Some aren’t blown from breath, but tied from plastic — transparent yet impermeable. Some bubbles wear balloons as their outer layer. Waterproof, able to shield against the friction of tiny particles. And some bubbles are carefully overlapping with others, sharing a minuscule space that only they coexist.
Me myself as a bubble as well, grow even fonder of misty skies. Vapors are stretching continuously, cool like well water in summer nights. When we share the same patch of fog, we are in direct connection, while we still both stay in our own solitudes.
I guess birds feel the same way. They rise and fall only in he morning mist, over the newly turned and sprouted earth. The vapor turns their figures into white watercolor, damply leaving curved droplets on the paper. Shake the paper gently, then the white pigment sways bashfully within each droplet.