The backs of my eyes, the eyelids: the color of the light in her apartment. I want a computer I can take to bed. I shade the slider bar over “warmer.” My body goes magenta. In Minneapolis, in Chicago, she is doing the same thing. It’s how I learned.

They didn’t have names the way we do now. They were cameras. “anacam.” “vampcam.” The images they produced and were somehow emptied the particulars of the associated body, there being so few “regular” bodies to look at. Then every regular body became extraordinary for its display. Maybe famous. Our bodies had histories you could participate in, thirty seconds at a time, as each new image came.

This was how I learned to operate…

Sixteen years later I am still no one, empty and typing, trying to explain how this feels. I can see how I looked when I was doing it, the 3Com HomeConnect aimed at my head. I told my professor. I emailed strangers. Even in IRC I couldn’t explain it. What did it mean to suddenly not be confined to text? How could I write that?

320 x 240. Refreshing every thirty seconds. Viewing source to make it prettier. We left a long trail, and anyone can walk it, as long the images remain indexed.

Melissa Gira Grant's LiveJournal username was a Kathy Acker line, as quoted in an essay by Steven Shaviro, found on a website in 1998. She knows exactly how that reads.