No one ever agreed on what it meant, and maybe that uncertainty became the only honest language left. Experts clung to charts and simulations, insisting on patterns, while ordinary people learned to navigate by instinct—by the way the air prickled before another failure, by the way birds vanished from power lines. The old arguments about blame and belief sounded smaller each day, drowned out by the simple urgency of getting through one more night with the lights still on.

Yet in that stripped-down world, something unexpectedly human took root. People who had never spoken to their neighbors now shared extension cords and whispered reassurances in dark stairwells. The absence of answers forced a different kind of presence: hands steadying each other on unlit streets, shared meals cooked on camping stoves, stories traded like currency. Whatever the fog was, whatever it meant, it left behind a fragile but undeniable truth: when everything else failed, they still had one another.