The Number I Wrote Down

June seventeenth. There's a grocery receipt on my kitchen floor right now that is approximately eleven inches long. I know this because I measured it against my forearm out of something between boredom and dismay. It doesn't feel like a lot of groceries. It feels, if I'm honest, like a Tuesday.

I've had a number written on a piece of paper since 2011, a monthly comfort number, the rough figure I decided meant I was okay. I've updated it twice. I wrote the supervisor rate next to it in early 2017 and felt quietly pleased with myself for about four days. What I did not do, apparently, is account for the fact that what counts as a comfortable grocery run has also updated itself, without consulting me or the paper. June in 2019 has opinions about what produce costs. So does the cheese section. So, it turns out, does my standing order in the kitchen, which has gotten more specific over the past year in ways I only noticed tonight when I was sitting on the floor trying to reconcile two numbers that no longer agreed with each other.

The evidence.

I didn't panic. That feels worth saying. I sat there with the receipt unspooled across my knee and the notebook open to a page that was not winning any arguments, and what I mostly felt was something like: oh, so this is where the drift happened. The number isn't wrong exactly. It just got a little fictional without my noticing, the way a word you say too many times stops meaning anything. I'm going to update it. Write a new one next to the old one and the 2017 one, so there's a little column of what 'okay' has meant across different years. That seems right. That seems like something I can do without making it into a whole thing.

After the math.

The receipt is still on the floor. Gerald is on the shelf above the stove doing whatever Gerald does in June, which appears to be growing aggressively to the left. The windowsill has its five things in the evening light and that gap that I've decided reads as patient. Everything is fine. I just need a slightly less fictional number.