Nobody folds a map anymore.
Nobody traces a finger down the crease
and counts the little squares
D4. B9. Page twelve, cross the state line,
grab the second atlas from the glove box.
Nobody does that anymore.
We are GPS people now.
We go to work. We go to school.
Soccer Tuesdays. PTA on Monday.
Friday night lights, same road, same route,
the voice in the dashboard telling us
turn left, turn left, you have arrived.
We don’t need to know where we are.
We only need to know we got there.
But Parkinsons is an atlas disease.
You must read it by grid.
Find yourself first
not the pin drop, not the blue dot,
the you that is ink on paper,
somewhere in a square
between tremor and stillness,
between the morning pill and the hour it fails.
Then find the destination.
Not cure. But your next task
Just make it to my next dose
Calculate the grid
how many boxes between D4 and where I need to be,
how many state lines I’ll have to cross
before anyone meets me halfway.
And I try to explain this.
I try to give you directions
the way I know how
grid by grid, crease by crease,
the way my mother taught me
in the passenger seat of a car
that didn’t have a screen.
But you are holding your phone.
You are waiting for the satellite.
You keep asking me
why can’t you just tell me the address
and I keep saying
there is no address.
There is only the grid.
There is only learning to read
where you are
before you can go anywhere at all.
We stand at the same intersection,
you and I,
speaking different languages
with the same map of the same country
in our different hands
and neither of us is wrong.
And neither of us can help the other.
And that is the loneliest thing
about this disease.
Not the tremor.
Not the forgetting.
It’s the translation