The GPS spoke to me in the tone of a substitute teacher trying to maintain authority while secretly unsure where the gymnasium is.
“Recalculating.”
It said this several times as I drifted through the afternoon traffic, past the pet store, past the pharmacy, past a truck coughing out a biblical amount of black smoke into the optimistic Spring air,
as if Indiana were a sentence no one had bothered to finish.
I switched the car vent to internal circulation, which felt less like a mechanical adjustment and more like a life strategy, the kind that keeps saying turn around when possible in a voice that sounds like it knows something you don’t.
Outside: brake lights, fast food signs, a line of geese crossing confidently — as if they had paid taxes and therefore owned the road.
I thought about the geese for a while. How they never recalculate. How they simply go, trusting whatever it is that geese trust, which is more than I can say for myself on a Monday afternoon in Indiana, recalculating, always recalculating, the route and everything else.