Fugue for Silver and Fog

Once, in the early morning—just before the light made sense of anything—I woke to see my own face reflected in a puddle behind my father’s shed, scattered by a pane of broken mirror. The moths were already there, trembling between shards, their wings leaving feeble trails in the mist. Every image since then dissolves as soon as I try to hold it: glass buckling under condensation, projections skipping when a living thing passes through. I keep thinking of mechanical eyes blinking out—Oursler’s screens, Bowie’s afterglow—trying to send their message but missing, always missing. The moths never land for long. It’s the vanishing I remember. This one cost something different—the willingness to be interrupted, for the picture to buckle, for living warmth to flicker over machine memory. Sometimes I wonder if the work is only made in the moments of losing it. The air in here tastes like tin, like marsh water. Maybe the silver remembers more than I do.