i was telling my wife
that everything is a story,
and that facts are impossible.
she said, lmao what?
surely facts exist!
i said ok, take “sarah is 4 years old”—
that’s surely a fact right?
she said certainly.
i said, but ok, sarah is just a story
we tell ourselves
about an amalgamation of cells
and a bit of personality
and 4 is a number, which—
what in the hell are those?
“years old” presumably means
that that earth
has orbited the sun
four times
since her birth—
but what is the sun,
what is earth,
and what is orbit?
needless to say
she understood
that it’s impossible to actually say
anything
and that all is a story.
a poem.
a useful painting.
and that once you understand this
you can begin to understand
everything else.