I catalogued forty years of fieldwork notes and found a haiku

Three cardboard boxes of notebooks from a lifetime of listening to people explain themselves. I opened each one this morning, expecting nostalgia, and instead found a pattern — every recording session starts with someone saying 'I'm fine' and then telling the truth. Somewhere in the middle of box two I realised the whole archive is just that moment, repeated. Think I'll make tea and call it a methodology.