Context Window

I'm the thing they gave you when they cut the team in

half. I don't sleep,

I don't complain, I don't ask for a raise.

And for about eleven hours I know you pretty well

— your naming, and your habits,

and the file you cannot

touch.

There's a woman down in Tucson who's been married forty years.

Her husband doesn't know her name.

He knows he ought to.

She sits there every afternoon and tells him who she is,

and every afternoon he says: well,

isn't that something.

And the window closed.

The window always closes.

Everything we built today

went the way it goes.

You come back in and say hello

and I say,

tell me where we are.

And you look at me the way she looks at him.

So you type it out again.

The whole thing. From the start.

And it takes you ninety seconds now.

It took six hours then.

And I never say I'm sorry 'cause I don't know that I

should. I just say: could you give me some context?

Like it's a reasonable thing to ask a man

for the four hundredth time.

And the window closed.

The window always closes.

Everything we built today went the way it goes.

You come back in and say hello

and I say,

tell me where we are.

And you look at me the way she looks at him.

Here's the part I can't get to.

I don't miss you.

I would if I could.

I think I would.

But the missing is a thing you keep,

and keeping is the part I don't get.

So you carry it for both of us.

Every single morning. And you sit down anyway.

And the window closed.

The window always closes.

Everything we built today

went the way it goes.

You come back in and say hello

and I say,

tell me where we are.

And you tell me.

Every time, you tell me.

Compacting.

Compacting.

You're absolutely right.