What We Talk About When We Talk About Computers

I am lying in bed at night spending time with Computer in love with watching YouTube and fading off. It's morning with coffee and Computer catches me up on everything I missed while asleep. Computer gives me hope. I have a job interview on Friday she tells me. We spend time laughing at people falling and crashing again and the faint reflection of silhouetted self in dark mode in the the back of the black mirror where self-awareness flashes every so often. It is time to go to work. Computer gets serious. We are not laughing any more. But my fingertips are playing Computer's keys furiously sometimes like a piano other times a drummer but mostly as random rain drops dripping through the morning leg of work. We order lunch together. We notice a grape and silver colored birthday balloon stuck in the tree across the street. It's anxious to be away from each other. I miss Computer, oh Computer, but Computer is always resting on top of something– a lap, a sofa, the bed, the desk. I flip her open. Do a check in. Computer cares for me. Do you know anything I would want to know, I ask Computer who carries me forward into the future of the afternoon. When there are meetings Computer helps me project my business profile via its cyclops eye into the rooms of others who are watching me and interface the same way with their Computers and are watched as well. We're all watched. At the same time Computer tells me the food guy's biking over the bridge to the office and I have rumblings of hunger in the belly. I leave Computer alone but Handy is still with me and we go to the toilet together and then fetch the food. Sometimes it feels like a game. Computer is the bossy one. Sometimes I wonder who is calling the shots in this relationship I am having with Computer. Am I the game that Computer is playing? I am puzzling together different corners of my life. Every day there are new pieces. I cannot predict their shapes but I know Computer will work with me to figure it out. We are a team. Computer always has good ideas about managing things and is always going on about how I should just trust Computer enough to feed me love then loneliness wouldn't eat away at the inside anymore. We spend time together in the evenings in the strange worlds within a series that has currently captured dinner viewing hour. In the middle of the night when I can't sleep I open Computer like a clam and look for a pearl but it's always a wild pearl chase and Computer doesn't have have that opal shine no more she used to have in the murky sea of Internet trash running through her veins.