Recalculating

The GPS says it first when I miss the exit,
that chirpy little apology of an AI voice:

Recalculating route.

Like it isn't mad. Like it forgives me instantly,
the way only something without a body can.

I drive on. It finds another way.

This is the whole promise of the product:

you can be wrong
and still arrive.

Ten years later, I say it to my therapist.

I tell her about the marriage, the mortgage,
the life I built facing the wrong direction
for a decade and called fine.

She doesn't say much.

She just watches me arrive, slowly,
at the sentence myself:

Recalculating route.

I say it like a diagnosis.

Like naming the damage
somehow makes it smaller.

Behind me, the GPS voice is still in the glovebox
of some old car, still forgiving people
for wrong turns it will never have to make.

My father says it last,
though he doesn't know that's what he's saying.

He's eighty-one, standing in the kitchen,
holding a mug he's held for thirty years,
trying to remember what a mug is for.

Where was I going, he asks,

not to me exactly,
more to the air,
more to whatever's left
of the man who used to know.

And something in me, cruel and involuntary,
the part of me raised on satellites and apps,
thinks the sentence before I can stop it:

Recalculating route.

Except there is no new road this time.

No cheerful voice waiting to reroute him
through some kinder, shorter street.

The machine forgives you
and finds a way.

The mind, when it's done,
just forgives you
and stops finding anything at all.

I used to think the phrase meant:

Don't worry.
There is always another path.

Now I think it meant:

You are lost,
and something is being extremely polite about it.

I stand in the kitchen with my father,
who is standing at the end of a road
none of us were ready to admit was ending.

And I don't say the line a fourth time.

Some sentences, once you understand them,
you stop needing to hear.