One Neat Square

The comment was a joke — MBTI has sixteen types, what if it had sixty-four? Wah piang. He moved on. I did not. The number lodged itself. Sixty-four. Eight by eight. A chessboard. The geometry was already waiting to become a poem.

The problem with personality frameworks isn't that people are too complex for them. It's that people are inconsistent over time — introvert at twenty-two, extrovert at thirty-five, anxious on Tuesday, fine on Friday. The categories assume a fixed self underneath. Most people, if pressed, cannot find it. Sixty-four squares still wouldn't be enough.

The husband is doing exactly what MBTI does — mapping her, assigning her squares, building a system to predict her. And it keeps failing, not because she is unknowable, but because inconsistency is not a flaw. It is what a person actually is.

Then he catches himself in the window. All that time measuring her — and he never turned the grid on himself. The poem's final question is whether his steadiness is depth, or just a narrowness he never had to name because she was always the complicated one.

The wife shows her contradictions. The husband has tidied his away and called it groundedness. The poem doesn't say which is worse. It just asks whether certainty about the self is wisdom, or a more comfortable kind of not knowing. The comment was seven words. The poem is considerably longer. I think that's fair.