These days Ernest swims in a dense fog which weighs down his garments and his hair with wet. Not quite dripping, but enough that he is clinging to himself, condensed and glistening. He stares out the window where moist air hangs on lush green foliage, and the tree branches, which are bursting with dark emerald leaves, never seem to muster the right kind of vitality to flower. The day is immensely still - yet it threatens some change which Ernest cannot quite anticipate. Birds chatter tirelessly and he notices them as if it’s the first day this year that they’ve cried out. Is it? In the morning, during stirrings between dream and waking he catches their new songs. He is most often alone, but never in silence - this is the benevolence of life he thinks. The gentle ceaseless hum of warm thick air. His world is so saturated but he cannot figure out with what substance. Beauty? He wonders.

And with some deliberation, he figures that whatever this substance is it is comprised of many elements, but not even sure that what he can almost parse out is in fact beauty, he turns away from the thought. What he is certain of though, is that it is the only thing that can keep him from suffocating in the humidity, the only thing that keeps the birds in song and the landscape so impossibly lush. Vines overtake the facades of crumbling brick structures and their long necks sip from the air. He has already resigned himself to beauty so to question its presence here is purposeless. Who is he to deny the aesthetic integrity of his world? Ernest knows that it is not truth that he could possibly seek, but a framework of belief which slowly scaffolds all around him.

For Ernest there is no God, he does not believe in a Deity, but he nonetheless has an unwavering faith to an object whose form he can almost make out through the mist - if only his vision could cut into its viscousness. “And if that were to happen…” he starts to think, immediately struck by the memory of an arid day that, when the world’s vacuousness rendered itself an immaculately clear image, he has seen there is no object at all. Disturbed, resisting the threat to his faith, he sets about to pray for more days enshrouded in mist. He prostrates himself, gazing brows furrowed listlessly upward - before a clap of thunder forces down his head, once again submerging under the surface of the balmy day.

Heavy clouds release from the air - now plummeting drops of water condemned to the earth. The wind sets in.