September Fog and Missing Days
September 16, 2022
Term’s almost over, but Petersburg’s September fog has wrapped my brain in that familiar haze, like the Neva’s mist swallowing Petrogradsky Island whole. Three months into my new life here (after the Moscow transfer that still feels half-dreamed), notebooks overflow with forensic psych case notes tangled up with story fragments that refuse to fade.
The big revelation: I’m finally writing it. A real novel, not just scribbles in the margins of classified files. It’s a thriller about the impossible made real: a day vanished from people’s lives. Not some psychological metaphor for trauma. No, erased clean, like a surgeon’s scalpel through neural pathways, leaving digital ghosts and half-remembered echoes.
The spark came on one of those damp September mornings, wandering Nevsky Prospekt when the city turns melancholic poetry. Fog so dense it blurs the Admiralty spire, makes you question if yesterday’s landmarks were ever solid. I started pondering memory voids, how we cling to our timelines even when they betray us. What if someone’s yesterday simply ceased to be? Here’s a raw excerpt from the draft:
“You messaged me yesterday,” I said, scrolling through the void in my feed.
“No.” Her tone was steady, analytical, like profiling a suspect. “Yesterday was the 14th. You were filming at the Hermitage.”
“But we met. We discussed the anomalies…”
“The 15th never existed. Check your analytics. Check the world’s.”
My phone blinked: 16th September. Yesterday: 14th. A flat line in between.
Still mapping the plot’s undercurrents. The investigation keeps drawing me toward Kaliningrad’s bunkers and Petersburg’s hidden labs, northern cities haunted by their own erased histories, Soviet secrets buried under tourist gloss. There’s poetry in how fog and forgetting entwine here, mirroring the mind’s fragile architecture.
My old Moscow supervisor would call it burnout fiction, projecting casework stress into shadows. Fair enough. But the sharpest tales emerge from that borderland where dissecting human lies meets the compulsion to rewrite truth.
Winter’s white nights can’t arrive soon enough. Time to let this rift widen.
Daria Ryzhikova
Writer
Daria Ryzhikova Writer