My hands look fine. Surprising. Not that they were in danger of not being fine. But more like I forgot I had them.

The woods were deaf with fog — not the type that hangs low and obfuscates deer crossing windy autumn roads as cars swerve and heartbeats elevate. But the atmospherical, spiritual type. The kind of fog that makes you wonder if you are actually in that place or whether there is just fog and the fog is just you.

I felt the fog before I saw the woods. Then I knew the fog before I felt the trees. Entering both was anticlimactic. Step. Fog. Step. Woods. Step. Nothing. No hands. Or at least no memory of having hands.

Before this, fog was simply the dense accumulation of heavy-yet-light precipitation in single vector. Not so, turns out. But why? Why does my academic perception of fog fall so woefully short of experiencing physical fog?

I don't know. And I don't care that I don't know. Life is filled with these questions. "What if I forget to breathe", "where does the wind come from", or "what if God isn't real". Real questions, sure. But not real real. These are just questions for which we can and should assume a conditional answer — the fog feels the way it does because it is fog and that is how fog is. That is that. And I guess, in a way, that is also what faith is.