Mercury Didn't Do It

The app buzzes at 7 a.m., bright as a toothpaste ad:

Mercury is in retrograde. Communication may be difficult today.

I have not yet spoken to another human.
I have not yet located my glasses, my keys,
or the will to be a person before coffee.

But sure. Blame the planet.

Always blame the planet
before you blame the fact that you, personally,
sent that text at 2 a.m.

By noon, my coworker forwards it to the group chat,
three crying-laughing emojis deep:

Mercury is in retrograde, she types,

because she missed a meeting she wasn't invited to,
because the planet, ninety million miles away,
apparently keeps her calendar now.

Mercury, who has never once answered an invitation,
is somehow responsible for every dropped call,
every ghosted date, every group project
where Kevin didn't do his slide.

We have discovered the one celestial body
willing to take the blame for Kevin.

My aunt says it differently, on the phone, softer,
after my uncle left without much of a goodbye,
just a note, some boxes, a door.

Mercury's in retrograde, she says, and laughs,

but it's the kind of laugh with a crack running through it,

because the real sentence,

I don't understand
how twenty-six years became a note on a counter,

is too heavy to say out loud in some random afternoon,

so she hands the weight to a planet instead.

Lets Mercury carry what no app update can explain:

that people leave for reasons no retrograde invented,
that some things go quiet
long before the stars do anything at all.

Here's what the app won't tell you, between horoscopes:

Mercury doesn't actually move backward.

It only looks that way from here,
an optical trick, a trail of light
bending around our own bad angle.

Nothing up there has stopped.
Nothing has reversed.

We're just standing in the wrong place,
watching our own confusion
projected across the universe,

and calling it the universe's fault.

So text him if you're going to text him.
Miss the meeting or don't.
Leave the note or don't leave the note.

Mercury was never listening.

It's been retrograde three times a year
since before we had the word for "blame"—

and every single time,

we were the ones who moved.