Sometimes I wonder if being with me is, for Jonás, a kind of betrayal of his mother. On a basic level, perhaps it’s not such a crazy idea. If he does feel that way, it explains why he’s putting off coming back. I don’t know. Still, here I am, Jonás, and maybe I’m thinking all this like a cat getting tangled in a ball of wool.

Instead of the ball of wool, I should pick up an actual ball. The texture of objects that bounce: one of my favourite stories is about the first ever writing. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains the first writer and the first writing. Io is the daughter of the Inachus river. Juno turns Io into a beautiful white cow. When she wants to complain to Argus – who watches her with his hundred eyes – all she does is moo. She’s terrified by her own voice, by that moo. She realises she can’t speak. She can’t communicate with her father, the Inachus river. Instead of words she uses letters, tracing them with her hoof in the sand to explain how her body was transformed. The father realises it’s his daughter and laments.

The first thing ever written down is a lament. The first writer writes the lament of her transformation. The first writing is on sand, on the banks of a river; words that soon become indistinct, that don’t last. Io, a woman transformed into a cow, writes her misfortune. Io is also, in Italian, ‘I’. The first person. The first person wrote her misfortune. With a woman’s cry of distress, that’s how writing began.

Before Cervantes, the first novel was written by a woman in Japan in the tenth century. A cry of distress in Japanese in an age when Chinese was the high language, that’s what Murasaki created. The Tale of Genji is the first novel. Love in the time of Genji could transform love today. Sor Juana also wrote in that strange and newly-minted language of New Spain. Io wrote for the first time in sand. Three women transformed the word.

If I had an AM radio show, I’d talk about them more. If I had a show in the early hours, I’d read something by them. It was Tania who said we should have a radio show, the AM kind where the words sound fuzzy. We’d introduce a few songs, make long phonecalls live on air. Not much music, but all love songs. Like the one I’m humming now, my friends.