is that all there is?

Dear Emma, I wanted to write this to you, I wanted to say this to you while I still have as much of me as I do. […] So I wanted to come out here while it’s still quiet so that I could look you in the eye in case— before I’m all gone and tell you that you are the love of my life because you make me laugh every day and you make my life worth living and you make me feel like I’m not alone. And if things were normal, then you’d be the person that’d make it okay that I gotta grow old and die someday because at least I got to spend some of that time with you. But things aren’t normal and so I guess instead, or as well, I love you because you stayed. Because when things got scary you knuckled down and you stayed. And you got me through each day. And I hope I did the same for you, or I hope that I can still do the same for you somehow.

“Powerful lights permitted high camera speeds, crucial in capturing the high-speed alchemy of surface tension, color change, and chemical reaction that [Kubrick and his collaborators] were after. The overcranked camera shooting at seventy-two frames per second produced a smoothly nuanced “galactic” slow motion as they used toothpicks to drip blobs of white paint into the ink-thinner mixture. Reacting to the banana oil, the paint sent ersatz star flows and galactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space. A macro lens made an area the size of a playing card look like a nebula light years across. Parts of what would become the film’s trippy Star Gate sequences were conjured in this way on the Upper West Side in 1965, with Kubrick himself manning the camera…”

"And you're in a bit of a bind, too." "How so?" "Because if you can't help me with my problem..."