Cartography of Fog

Before sunrise, the city is a wet bell, rung softly by buses exhaling at red lights. Streetlamps hold their small moons low, and windows bloom one by one, like matches struck behind thin paper.

I walk where bakeries breathe sugar and yeast, where pigeons stitch gray commas into the square. Fog drifts from the river in folded silk, wrapping statues, erasing their names, leaving only shoulders and lifted hands.

In that blur, memory loosens its buttons: my grandmother rinsing apricots in a blue bowl, my father laughing with rain in his hair, a radio murmuring weather no one believed. Each recollection arrives half-lit, then turns, and is weather again.

By full morning, edges return to everything. The tram wires tighten like violin strings. I carry the vanished hour in my coat pocket, a map drawn in breath, already fading as I unfold it.