When you stare long enough, fog begins to blend in with its surroundings. Or maybe the other way around – scenery and mist fading into the same picture.

I wade through the fog, barely able to see further than my own hand stretches out, my surroundings fading into nothing more than a white blanket engulfing me. 

I think. 

I stand and I think. Because that is about all I can do while I wait. 

While I wait for the fog to lift so I can find my way. 

The fog asks the questions I have for so long been running from:

How does the trap of naivety entice me as it has?

What price do I have to pay for the crimes committed? The toll for the traumas of my past caught up, spilt into the river of this present.

How could the indecency of this prison of youth tear the fairytale from me?

How many clocks can wind back to change the past? How many clocks will have to pass until I can release it?

I reach out and touch the fog. It slips right through my fingertips, effortlessly flowing onward through the wind. 

Does the longing stop somewhere? 

Have I met my match 4 years too late?

Does this lump that forms in my throat denote what could have been?

For the love I so desired when I came home was right in front of me.

But I was tricked by my own mind into thinking that only wrongs can happen. And the right must be wrong because I could not be so deserving of such bliss and purity

Of such love and joy 

That once there has been a lifetime of trials and tribulations, the dust may never settle. 

The fog may never lift.

I was wrong. 

Only a lifetime of fog can allow you to see through it, only a lifetime of wrongs can show what’s right.

So I do not wait for the fog to lift.

I reach my arms out and I poke and I prod my way through. 

Knowing that if the fog does not lift now,

The further I go 

It will lift eventually,

And I see clearly ahead of me.