It’s sunnier than it was in the summer of 2002, the product of a world hell-bent on heat. This year, seventy-degree days have been replaced by scorching stretches of drought, and the fertile plains of the Midwest are unable to bear food. The fog is a relief. Was it ever as foreboding, as secretive, as I once made it out to be? I’m eight years older now than I was that summer—in August, I’ll turn thirty—and my anxiety about the fog, its powers of concealment, has slipped away from me. It’s better that way, though I suppose the world has lost some of its glitter. It’s as though I’ve peeled away some holographic veneer, and the world is stark, actual. Night fits obediently into its little box. And I, perhaps, fit obediently into mine. It’s been years since I dreamed the way I did in Madison. I don’t walk in my sleep anymore—two nightly medications and four years of careful calibration have seen to that. It’s strange; actually, the medications make my dreams easier to remember.
