smudge

I saw Trevor around the gym for months — scattered tattoos and black tank top with a cute smudge of climbing chalk on their ears.

It’s intellectually interesting to know that the faint gray smudge barely visible on the horizon is the result of literal pieces of the sun that have been blasted toward you at hundreds of miles a second, funneled into our atmosphere by Earth’s magnetic field and induced to emit light via graduate school physics concepts.

But to the naked eye, on this night of nights, away from the light pollution of the cities, it was still just a slowly moving green-gray smudge, only there was just a lot more of it.

I got a few distant glimpses during the first few years I lived here, a gray-green smudge on the horizon.

But, against the odds, he found what he hoped for - a brown smudge on the white ice sheet.