In-Between Alphabet: Q is for Quite

Quite is a drama queen, shifting from one extreme to another, never happy with the middle ground. It likes to step out of the crowd around it and be noticed. With a high opinion of itself, Quite surrounds itself in the extraordinary, the exceptional, and the geniuses. Yet, it’ll suffer no fools. Quite gets to the root of the matter, speaking the truth in a no-nonsense manner. It lives in a black-and-white world. It is or it isn’t, nothing else.

She says Quite, delighted, bowled over by the puppies engulfing her with their flyaway fur and slick tongues and gleaming noses. He has been replaced by faces much hairier than his, the outlines of his body blurring into the general background of other-things-not-puppy. It doesn’t bother him. He’s always known he may come first to her on most days in this present-day scenario, but he ranks far below puppies and kitties and other animals with pelts much fluffier than his. Instead, he laughs, his camera phone capturing her and the surrounding vague blurs of frenetic action. When they leave, though, her whole face and body collapses into the center of her being. “Can’t we bring one home? Just one?” Someday, he says to her, someday we’ll have a home with a big backyard and a white picket fence and room for a hundred puppies to roam, even as he can’t even begin to imagine a scenario in which a hundred puppies can fit into a normal suburban household. Someday, he repeats for emphasis. And the fact that he can say someday, that their future together is so assured as to be predicted and assumed satisfies him the way he never understood during the phases of his life he shunned companionship and even during phases when he longed for it. She says Quite, and it sounds like agreement, like confirmation. It sounds like truth.