In the third year of the 21st century

In the third year of the 21st century, my parents and I lived 960 kilometers away from our hometown.

The first set of numbers I remember in my life is my grandparents’ landline — I learned it earlier than the date of my own birthday. It was an eleven-digit sequence, a four-digit area code followed by a seven-digit number. This country is so vast that every city has its own area code: the capital is 010, my hometown is 0913, and the place where I was born and spent my childhood is 0546. Every patch of land was a string of digits. In my early memories, the country was a jigsaw puzzle made of numbers.

In my mother tongue, the word “digital” commonly translates in two ways, one literally as “electronic”, the other as “numeric”. Beyond the binary logic of 0 and 1, numbers encode everything around us.

A year later, our family bought the first computer. The case was almost cubic, clumsy, and heavy; the interface was blocky and angular, equally awkward.

All I knew how to do was open the Paint program and draw crooked lines with the mouse. A quarter-arc in the top corner of the canvas was the sun, the jagged line at the bottom was the lawn. Two circles drawn on top of each other made a snowman. After finishing the snowman, I could use the paint bucket to fill the background with blue. But only after carefully checking that every other line was closed, otherwise the snowman would end up standing on a blue lawn with a blue sun overhead.

One of the popular songs at the time had a lyric that went, “Take it easy, Windows 98”. The song resurfaced a few years ago, and people said its melody sounded like the millennium in full bloom.

When I was six, we moved again, from 0546 to 0510. The map of our migration was traced digit by digit; the feathers of migratory birds were scattered across the land.

In primary school, we had computer lessons, then called “microcomputer class.” An entire class of children would line up at the door of the computer lab, put on blue plastic shoe covers, and only then were we allowed into the computers’ realm to learn powering on and off, typing, file management, and Office software. After handing in the class assignment, we were allowed to play for a short while. But the lab machines were not connected to the Internet during lessons, and we usually only had typing tutors or drawing programs to play with.

In recent years, social media has been fond of the so-called “Y2K-core”, the images mentioned most often are the heavy blue curtains and the blue plastic shoe covers at the door of the microcomputer room.

People miss the millennium so much that it makes me wonder, was the millennium really that beautiful, truly free, passionate, and full of hope? I was too young then, busy moving from place to place, and never really looked closely at any single place.

After that, memories of the digital world multiplied like an outbreak, life was no longer separate from the electronic realm. From email to chatrooms to forums and then social apps, the electronic world grew from a solitary curiosity into my connection with the world. My family ties, friendships, and loves were all mediated through it. Bit by bit, I uploaded a part of myself online. From then on, I finally had a hometown that was immutable and reachable at any time.