A "Q" Day

Two days ago, I took my camera out at one-thirty in the morning to document the golden rays of sun reflecting, filling, enriching the leaves on the tree outside by the deck. I've spent the day reading a profoundly sad book. (Go and get Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.) I've been living in alternating moments of hope and despair, and in complete envy of both the author and the protagonist. (Is it enough that I was there to see the leaves of the tree, my tree? Being there by myself – does that make the moment infinitely more precious, or infinitely more sad? Could it be both, and neither?) I want to go to New York, and not just for Christmas, as I've always said. I want to go to an art supplies store and try out all of the pastels, crayons, pencils, markers. I want to leave my mark in invisible footprints throughout the city. I want to be lost in the bustle, the vibrancy, to lose...but be more fully myself at the same time. I want to throw my emptiness into the air of New York, into other people's emptiness, into the infinite collision of emptinesses. I want to breathe in the city, that piece of the universe charged with people's voices, charged with thoughts, always busy, lit-up, brave.

It's been a “Q” day. “Q” is my favourite letter of the alphabet. It's the beginning of every Question, every Quest. It's the Quagmire through which we all tread, the Quickening of our pulse, the Quiet that falls like a protective shroud. It's to take the nothing, the zero of an “O,” and to flesh it out into existence. The void becomes a balloon that carries me above the literal. It becomes the curled up ball of a sleeping kitten, who flourishes her tail in her dreams occasionally. “Q” is the magnifying glass through which the world looks salvageable, is salvageable. It all goes back to those golden leaves. My photo has saved that moment, that moment which was one of the googolplex of a googolplex of moments. And I salvaged it.