Hello, World!
Hello, you indifferent, crazy, hateful-yet-loving, surprising, marvelous, warm, and cold ellipsoid. How are you doing? Good? Not quite, huh? Well, it’s been a tough year. We need to talk.
I’ve been meaning to talk to you for quite some time, and simply thinking about doing it makes me anxious and a bit depressed, to be honest. It gets worse because I’m not sure what I have to say, I just know I do have things to say. I have plenty.
Let’s try and start from the beginning: my name is Fabrício. I am a web developer, a computer programmer, a software engineer. The titles vary, but they all mean I usually see you, World, as zeros and ones. Everything is binary, true, or false. Imagine Neo gazing at the walls of the hall, bending reality. There is no reality, there is no spoon. But unlike Neo, and I’m not in the Matrix — not that I can tell, anyway. There are spoons. And, beyond them, there are emotions and sensations and experiences, a multitude of things nearly impossible to describe as zeros and ones. But only nearly. Still, as hard as I try, things are more complicated than zeros and ones. John Green said (in a different context), “there are infinite numbers between zero and one.” Which is called fuzzy logic, by the way.
Besides, can we even represent reality as zeros and ones? Sure we can represent words as bytes — the words you’re reading were sent to you as electrical signals over miles and miles of cable, after all — and we can represent reality through words. However, to do that, first, we need to convert reality into words, and doing so is far harder than converting words into bytes.
It’s not easy bringing emotions, sensations, and experiences to life through words. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes craft. It takes rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. And to get better at it, we have to practice. So I’ve been practicing. Not as often as I’d like, true — balancing work, and life, and writing is a hard task — but often.
Every now and then I sit down and put not pen to paper, but fingertips to keyboard, and if not an ocean of words, a humble river comes to life. Sometimes there are only a few drops, and sometimes the river smells bad, with thick and dark water. But other times the water is sparkling clean, and it comes and goes, right and left, it sways, it dances, and it’s alive. And I was the one to bring those words to life.
I’ve been giving birth to words and nurturing them, and caring for them as a loving mother. But being a parent is hard. There is no one recipe, no algorithm to make perfect decisions. And one key factor makes me a bad mother: I keep my words in the dark.
I’ve been keeping my children locked inside the four walls of my computer’s screen. It’s dark in here — I use everything in dark mode. And yes, I keep them in the cloud, I’m not a dummy. If my computer explodes or gets kidnapped by a hawk, my children will be safe in the cloud. But it’s dark in the cloud as well. As I said, I use everything in dark mode. So my words have been living in this dark cloud, and I’m terrified that they go out, afraid of them getting in the rain.
I’ve spent 2020 locked in my apartment as well, and I enjoyed it — as far as the constant state of paranoia allowed — but I do understand some people are not as indoorsy as I am, they don’t like to stay in the dark. They want to go out and see the sun, and see you, World. And my words are like these people. Sure, some of my words will stay here with me and never see the light of day, they are fine with the dark insides of the rumbling cloud, but the time has come to let free those who want to go out.
So here they are, World, my words!
Words, this is the World. World, these are my words. Be nice to them.
