Curvilinear

is the word for the way my brain thinks

is the opposite of a line

is the roundabout way with a scenic view so forgive me if I wander off and lose the task at hand.

Now there’s a black butterfly on the late summer hydrangeas that before this spring had not
bloomed for several years, refusing to show their colors like children who for no apparent reason
have chosen not to speak.

Now this has got me curious and I want to search online for why hydrangeas might stop
flowering and children might stop speaking. My theory is that they just want to know what
it’s like

to not have to express themselves all the time

or perhaps in the case of children it is to silence their thoughts and rest for a while in the quiet like monks.

My son has never stopped talking. He has always loved to talk. He started very early at nine
months old when he said More? Once, during an evaluation in which we hoped to discover the
word for how his brain thinks, a doctor asked if he ever said things in a peculiar way.

Yes, he did. Back then he sometimes assigned things numbers and referred to them as such. For
instance, if three books were stacked on his nightstand: Dumbo the Flying Elephant on bottom,
Thomas the Train in the middle, and Winnie the Pooh on top, he might’ve said to me I want to
read the number two book because he wanted to read Thomas the Train and it was in the second
position of the stack. I said this to the doctor and she assigned it a score which must’ve been
neutral because at present we still do not know the word for how he thinks.

But curvilinear

is my word

is to approach the middle, end, and beginning all at once

is the way God thinks I think and so it is not ideal for human life and has now gotten me in
trouble.

The assignment was due yesterday. I have not turned it in. Now the manager whose job it is to
manage me wants to know where. Where have I put it? Where can he find it?

Go outside, I want to say, and look up at the clouds. What shapes have they taken? Do they move
swiftly across the sky? The best kinds of clouds I think we can agree are the flat-bottomed ones
that grow upward and massive and are time-lapsed in nature films to demonstrate the bubbling
up of a storm.

But it would be useless to say this. The manager has not asked about my process. And so I say
It’s almost there having learned a long time ago to never say I.