When I was six, a writing software program for kids was installed on our first Macintosh computer. My father only invested in educational computer programs like “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” The writing program had an endless reserve of little empty booklets. One side of the page was always left blank for me to make illustrations, shakily, with a fat mouse: little girls with large heads and balloon hands, floating in a colored background that I filled with a single click. The other page, lined, was vaguely off-white. I wrote odes (“The Buity [sic] of Spring”), memoirs (“The Sleepover”), and treatises (“OLD MOVIES”). The stories had elaborate beginnings and lazy endings, and featured characters like crying jesters, smoking mothers, and many schoolgirls. I often sat alone, writing, in the only computer room. Though I still had a dog then, Ofelia, who’d wander in with her tail that was too short. I printed out each story, the ink slowly and loudly shifting back and forth. The neon colors of my drawings turned dull on the matte page, while the uniform words sat neatly on the lines. Even typos didn’t look like mistakes. These pages, with their off-white shade that I sometimes confused for the after-glare of the computer, bear the first stories I ever typed.

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, translator, and associate editor of Hyperallergic.