Sunday Mist And Drizzle

When does a mist become a drizzle? When you go outside.

At least, that's how it seemed today. No mist is finer than the one you see through your window; the moment it touches your skin, it is no longer drifting. Then it has fallen; it has become a drizzle.

On Sundays, most people will experience it through their windows: as a mist. If it continues, it turns to rain on Monday.

All right: Now I've given you a local weather report and forecast. You came to this blog to read that, right?

Anyway...This is the first Sunday mist and drizzle I'm experiencing in this new apartment. (In a couple of days, I'll have lived here for two months. I guess it's still a new place for me.) It's funny that a couple of days ago I thought that I'd never see the kind of light I used to see around the old place on misty Sundays. It is, in some ways, even more stark than what one sees on the clearest and coldest day of every winter. That is because the light that has become of the mist from the river, which was only a block away from my old apartment, seemed to focus the hard if not sharp edges of the warehouses and shops, empty on Sunday, and the rows of sometimes-shabby but sturdy houses where many sleep and others retreat.

Here, the rows of brick houses and buildings seem to take depth from, yet add texture to, the misty air. It's like a kind of Pointillist painting, except that the grains that make up the image are even finer, and that image is on an even greater scale. I will risk triteness in saying that it is perhaps more romantic--in a very bourgeois (which I don't mean derogatorily) way. On the other hand, the light and mist around my old place, in its definition by sharper lines through a more encompassing kind of veil that drapes itself over the buildings and anything else that happens to be outside, seems somehow more apropos of an industrial, blue-collar neighborhood. There, it is definitely a drizzle and, as often as not, turns to rain.

It seems that mist and drizzle filled every Sunday of the first fall and spring I spent at the old place. They were also the last fall and spring I spent before I began to live full-time as Justine. Now, seven years later, I've had my surgery and it seems that I'm still early in the first chapter of my new life. That means, of course, the mist cannot remain a mist for long: It will become a drizzle--that is to say, change. Naturally, I do not, and probably cannot, know what kind of change I'll experience, save for what has already been planned. All I know is that there will be some rain and some sun, and whatever's in between.