I’m sitting here next to my daughter. She’s reading Lucy Cousins and Williambee books. I just registered my two older kids for next semester’s classes, and now I’m writing down why I might think it’s worth writing anything down at all. This morning I realized that hyperbole might not be hyperbole, tall tales might not be so tall, because I did drink the sky. I felt like I was Donã Flor, the giant woman. I drank the sky because I was thirsty and it was the only thing that would relieve me. Is that a metaphor, a hyperbole? Or just the most accurate, real, technical thing I could have said? I live off of maybes and mights. Oh, I do think might is right, just not force-might, but wondering-might.

Yesterday I saw my dad’s text that said something like, “mom and everyone doesn’t understand…” When he says “mom” he means, my mom, his wife. I didn’t tell him that his compound subject means that he should’ve used the plural verb. I don’t want to be a low-ball person, and what I really think is that it’s fun to play with grammar structures, and what, I might be wrong anyway, or some day in the future when the grammar norms have changed again, I might be wrong. So I didn’t bother there. How is it that letters on a screen touch our eyes and immediately drop in to some cavern deep inside us, taking us with them. Then we sit there the whole day wondering, hm, will I climb out of here and what will be the way? This is not hyperbole, this is what happens. And the Anno’s fairy tale about the fox in the well who climbed out on the back of a goat whom he tricked into climbing into the well with him, that fairy tale doesn’t seem so hyperbolic. I don’t want to trick a goat down into the cavern with me, and I don’t want to climb out on its back then leave it for dead. So I’m meandering around and around in the cavern, thinking.

It is not unusual for my dad to say things about my mom “not understanding.” I see on the cavern walls that this story has been painted again and again and again. A motif. So many layers of “she doesn’t understand.” I see all these words floating around in the air and I’m like, if they’re in here, then they’re in here. That’s interesting. How much of “she doesn’t understand” is in here? There are tests for asbestos, tests for lead, tests for radon, and I have to discover a test for “she doesn’t understand.” I also have to figure out the critical point—when does toxicity begin, what’s the threshold? I don’t remember learning in school, or anywhere, any equations for how to calculate these numbers, so I’m going to have to work by analog and educated guesses and a lot of scratch work. I need to take inventory of how much is in here, but that’s not just a matter of counting. That means I need to discern how many layers each “she doesn’t understand” is made of, and is it the same across all or does it differ per, and how do I assign values, and is it a static population or dynamic…

There’s the beginning of my to-do list, and I haven’t yet ordered it, which I say because I could hear someone, could imagine hearing someone, say well that’s a backwards list, to which I say maybe so, that’s fine it’s a raw list and that’s important too, the raw things. I will not erase the raw from the finished product, because to me, everything is relevant, everything matters.