I flitted through Hope Coffee dipping in and out of each photograph. I had promised myself to leave by 8:30 p.m. and it was already 8:45. In less than 12 hours, the men from church would be knocking on my door, ready to load up the U-Haul, and I still had packing to do.
Attending the art show, which featured my classmate’s work, let me check two boxes off my to-do list. It fulfilled the “cultural engagement” assignment due Monday for my Theology of Art & Worship class, and it let me wave goodbye to the world before the tsunami of cardboard and packing tape pushed me under.
Reflections on light and darkness. Each piece nodded to the name of the exhibit—light flickering off a child’s face, sun slicing through the distant clouds, a cobblestone street basking in the morning light. All of them saluted to the theme, except one.
In The Mist by Paul Singleton, used with permission.
It stopped me as I buzzed around the corner and pulled me onto the cement jetty, past twenty-five seagulls, maybe thirty. It was hard to tell that far into the fog. Still. Peaceful. Stark. I felt those foggy mornings back up north on the dock, when the mist refused to say goodbye to the lake.
What was it about that piece? The dull one. The one with edges blurring and lines disappearing into the mist?
There was nothing beautiful in it. A cement jetty. Dirty gulls. Slate water evaporating into grey air. For all I knew, trash floated in the water and a warehouse crumbled on the other bank. Still, a door swung open and someone beckoned me in.
My eyes reached into mist, searching for the horizon, for a shape, for something to materialize out of the fog, but the foreground pulled me back. To the cement. The water. The gulls.
I forgot the boxes and how thin and fragmented I felt, stretched between last month and next month and bashed around by the impossibilities of my to-do list. I found myself standing on the jetty with the gulls, present in this moment, receiving it, regardless of what lay beyond.
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