Memory in the Fog

Dear diary, it’s Harmony again with an update and a gripe. You would think that after thirteen years of dressing myself, I would get used to the process. I am fifteen years old and honestly there are days that I don't feel like I can manage it by myself. Remember me telling you about Faith? She is five years older and it still takes her longer to get ready. So that is something I guess. All I want to do is run to the Grocery for rations. I don’t think I will ever get used to wearing this gear. It feels heavier the longer you wear it and it really starts to rub the insides of my legs as I walk. I want to be done with the boots too! Ugh, the boots! They are the worst thing EVER CREATED! They hurt, and they are so ugly. Come on!!

Mom says that it is still not safe to go outside. It is a pretty fast death, like that older woman I saw ten years ago. I think that she forgot what was going on, or maybe she gave up, I don’t know. I do remember looking out the window and there she was. She just walked out in the middle of the street, looked straight up putting her face to the sun, arms out to her sides, like she was getting ready to fly or trying to catch something falling from the sky, and then after a few minutes she just collapsed. I remember she had this really beautiful outfit on, like she was going to a party. Such a sad way to go. Diary, when is the fog going to lift? I found more pictures in the basement of this hotel. Life looked so amazingly different thirty years ago. Being able to go to a park, going anywhere really would be an experience. The fog has been so thick and toxic for the last thirty years that we can’t go outside for more than a few minutes without gear.

I was in the basement of the Radisson hotel looking through trunks of old pictures and mementos that had been left there. Such a weird place to leave them… So many trunks just stacked in the basement left by people that are no longer alive. How did they all get down there? All the hair just stood up on my arm thinking about someone having to carry them down there. It’s a really good thing that mom found this place. One of the few lately with an air scrubber that can handle the whole building. I don’t talk much about the Fog. I was not there when it all went down obviously. I know the history as well as anyone else that has survived but it is all a story as to what actually caused it. Bane, one of our travel neighbors, told me one time that God was tired and needed a break from taking care of so many people. Bane is dumb and I know that, don’t worry. My mom says that there was an industrial plant in the middle of the Asian desert that was trying to create an alternative fuel or something. I don’t know if this is the exact thing that happened either, there is no news, no books about it, and not a lot of people anymore to ask. Anyway, they were trying to make something new and it blew up and left behind this horrible fog. Like a nuclear bomb or something really. It spread across the whole world and dad says that there is a big pit now where that part of Asia used to be. But now we can’t go outside, we have to get rations from a select few stations in old grocery stores. Did I tell you it is all canned food or dried? Mom says it is what these people called astronauts used to eat in space. I don’t know if I believe that either.

My mom showed me her prized possession trunk again up in our room. Since we have to move so often to look for work, we each only get one trunk to hold all of the things important to us. My trunk is mostly photo albums and random pictures of people from before that day thirty years ago. I don’t know any of them, but I told you before that I feel like they are worth keeping. I wonder what they will call this time one day when they get back to school. Mom says all the kids were together in a room at school and would look at books and learn the history of people that came before them. It sounds wonderful. They will have some big fancy name for that day and an era to mark the times before and since. Our pictures will be in books for kids to see what we had to deal with. I find these pictures of women dancing and wearing the most beautiful clothing I have ever seen. Long silk gowns and gloves that look so soft you could melt into them. Beautiful jewelry that just sparkles and shines like the smiles of the women wearing them. And the shoes. Oh my goodness the shoes! I have no use for such beautiful, elegant shoes, but diary, I DREAM almost every night about those shoes. So much better than those ding-dang boots!!

Anyway, mom loves her trunk which is why she gets it out so much. The trunk is full of things from her family and things that she wished to pass on to me and my older sister Faith. Naming her daughters Faith and Harmony is a pretty good indication of the kind of person she is. Not like our travel neighbor Bane Connor, I think his parents lost hope a little. The names are so on the nose for how everyone is perceiving things. It is probably so hard to think of other things when it takes fifteen minutes to get dressed every day or that we have to check out a weapon just in case we run into another surviving family like us or the Connors. It is sad but we just don't know who we can trust anymore. There is so much sadness and not a lot to look forward to in the future right now so I can see it. Nice that my mom was leaning toward optimism with me and my sister though.

So mom pulled the lid off her industrial possessions trunk as if something was going to jump out at us. She seems surprised every time at what is inside. Like it is a new treasure chest that she found. As if she doesn’t know every single thing that could be in there. She is funny that way. Mom pulled back the beautiful quilt that her mom made right after the fog set in. Somehow Nana knew that we were going to want all these shirts to remember before and so she turned all of my mom’s old childhood shirts into this large, beautiful quilt. We reunited with Nana about three years ago when we did our backpacking across the desert towards the mountains. With no phone, television, or something called the internet, we did not know if she even survived. We had to find work and luckily for me, she was okay. She is so sweet and amazing and somehow so optimistic. It is so eye opening to be around her. It is hard to imagine someone in our life could think there was a bright end in sight and how to make the best with the way the world is.

Anyway, mom takes out a small tin box of pictures from when she was a child. I tried to convince her to put the pictures in with mine but she says it is weird to have her pictures in with those of strangers. They don’t feel like strangers to me. She set the tin box aside and pulled out a couple small, colored bags. Today she does not open them, but I know what they are so I am okay. She piqued my interest in how far down in the trunk she was so I put down the stack of papers I was looking at and walked over to her. She was really digging down towards the bottom. I knew that there was no way she was going to take out the thing that I want more than anything else, but my hope and curiosity got the better of me. I sat there mentally crossing my fingers and silently begging her to pull it out from the slightly fuzzy red box in that black bag in the bottom of her trunk. Please mom, I just want to see your locket. It is so beautiful. Please get it out. Please please.

She was going down three, four layers of her trunk and I thought that there is no way that she would get to it. When all of a sudden she grabbed this envelope just before the bottom of the trunk. It was large for something new. How have I never seen it there before? I was practically vibrating that there was in fact something new in there. I kept thinking that it can’t possibly be better than the locket but okay… I wanted so bad to see that locket that I almost shoved her aside to get it out myself. I think she knows how much I like it. The story behind it is beautiful. Mom opens the envelope and slides out a large picture. Do you know how excited I was to see it was a picture?! I practically pounced on her to get a better view of it. It was a picture of her wearing the perfect, silver heart-shaped locket. It is so delicate and beautiful and perfect! Mom said she was about eighteen when this picture was taken. It was about two years before the fog set and she and dad had just started dating. For their one year anniversary he bought her this locket with a picture of himself inside it. She had gone to a professional to get a picture taken of her with the locket to frame on their wall later. She was so excited about it and was so in love with the locket. Then the fog came and they all had to flee to the detox stations. They are lucky they both survived it, so many families were torn apart back then. Mom finished telling me all about the photo and wipes a tear from her eye.

Then she turned to me and told me how happy she was in that picture and how she knows that tomorrow will be better. She said to keep holding on to the things that I think are important and to not forget where I come from. I really hope this fog lifts soon so she can display her locket again and show the world where we come from. Maybe one day she will pass that locket to me and the picture too. For now, I know that the history we are finding and the history we are making is enough to get me through to another day. Until tomorrow diary.