Foggy Commute

Image by Alesha Burton

The sky is shifting colours. Rainbows of artificial lights paint the sky. Above my old high school is a wildfire. When I pass by, the lights are all orange. Above the mosque is a bright white, growing to become its own streetlight. Cars are in the parking lot at 6 in the morning. A car pulls out as I pass by.

A bus comes down the road. Its yellow-orange sign blurs in the distance. My eyes are growing foggy. Condensation is in my mask and my eyelashes indiscriminately. My breath grows beads of sweat across my eyeballs.

The bus picks up a passenger by the bus stop as I pass by. It turns onto another road to continue its route.

The major street up ahead is also burning red. Bright, long buses float along like spirits in a stream. A side road with one streetlight illuminates the wet concrete. My shoes are thinly damp. The bus stop I stand by has many others there. I haven’t missed the bus.

The bus’ glowing blue and yellow lights are bee fur in the darkness. I look up at the sky and the haze that is the moon is surrounded by a field of rainbows. The sky isn’t even close to a sunrise.

The bus leaves and we head to the station, slowly. Most bus stops are shrouded in foggy darkness, a figure stepping out of stage left whenever they wish to board. When we turn into the station, blurs of express buses and buses with too many people whizz by and light up the station.

I walk upstairs to the train platform. It’s filled with people in puffy lavender jackets and suits holding briefcases. There are nurses uniforms and excited little kids with princess-themed backpacks. There is a security guard going to work.

The eastbound terminal station is unseen. A train heading there appears. Its white lights grow and dissipate in the morning fog. At the same time, a train heading westbound appears. Its lights blossom, growing brighter and brighter like ice crystals in the snow.

The scenery outside the train is non-existent. The recycling facility grows to a blur of smoke and cardboard boxes. The signage encouraging the workers to keep recycling is lost against the missing walls of the facility. The lots of unused truck loads, buses, and lots of the same pickup truck with no stickers are melting into blobs of grey and green.

The graffiti is barely visible. The expression of artists years and years on are lost in darkness. From 2008, paint stripped from walls from rain and power washes, to 2022, a Happy Pride message beside letters and names I cannot decipher.

The station is brighter. The sky is waking up nearly an hour after I’ve left my house. The fog doesn’t dissipate. The world simply wakes up to a blue cloud hovering outside their windows. I head downstairs to the subway and get on the train waiting at the station. The off-grey shuttered exterior reflect the edge and the age of the train.

The old NO SMOKING sign is hilarious to look at in the moment. In a few weeks it won’t be.

The train has two early outdoor stops. As we ride by, they remind me of Silent Hill. I sit inside and look out at blocky rendered houses and pure white fog obscuring my vision. At least I don’t have to worry about monsters attacking me from outside of the render distance.

When we get to the bridge, the fog begins to clear. The highway isn’t a mess of colour but rather, individual squares and diamonds of light. The highway sign is very visible. As is the smoke pillar in the distance.

Downtown Yonindale is clear. Two hours after I first left my house, the fog lifts over the city and disappears. The first breath outside reminds me of my soggy mask as I head to my morning class.

— Heleza

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Foggy Commute was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.