This is a photo that I did not take of the hurricane that ransacked my bedroom, leaving only chaos and taking all of my favourite things: headphones and notebooks and clothes; cameras, stuffed animals, jewelry — all packed away into neat (if huge) bags, like the hurricane has obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This is a photo that I did not take of my own panicked face as I realized this morning that none of my music had made the leap to my new laptop, and that the hard drive I was using to transfer from my desktop was corrupted, andwhat am I going to do, that was sixty gigabytes worth of music— this is a photo that I did not take of my relief that everything was fixable, that sixty gigs doesn’t actually take so long to transfer, that I know what went wrong and that I was able to put everything back together.

This is a photo that I did not take of the sweater that I just noticed lying under a blanket, hiding from me so that it won’t have to leave its home.

This is a photo that I did not take of the miscellaneous junk sitting next to my carry-on bag: two (more) notebooks;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; two small bottles of nail polish, my cell phone, my iPod, some pens and USB drives. My laptop. My pyjamas. My toothbrush.

This is a photo that I did not take of something that I’m probably forgetting, that I will never take a photo of because I’m not going to miss it until I’m nine thousand miles away.

(And this is a photo that I did not take of Google Maps telling me to kayak across the Pacific Ocean, and the muscles I’ll have from doing that.)