I’ve been thinking a lot about journals lately and how much Prof. Logan loves them. He’s read pretty much every article there is on their benefits. Even without radical sharing, he’d be thrilled if the only thing EMBRS ever did was make people journal more. One of the big ones he talks about is how it’s supposed to help us deal with our trauma since it’s a way of processing on the page, framing the story into something the writer can begin to understand and share.

That’s not the way our family works though. There is an unspoken understanding that grandfather told me the news. Grandmother and I won’t ever talk about it, and if possible, grandfather and I won’t talk about it again either. It’s what we do when faced with an obstacle—let everyone know so we are all aware. Otherwise, continue as normal. Not great for processing, I am realizing, but writing this out is helping it feel more contained. Maybe if I had been keeping a journal when my father left, things wouldn’t have gone so poorly.

I was eight years old. Nobody told me he was leaving. There were only two signs. The first, a furious argument between him and my grandparents that I overheard in the middle of the night. He accused them of being overbearing and driving my mother away. They accused him of being irresponsible, abandoning his daughter in favor of a risky business opportunity in Shanghai. They only stopped shouting when grandmother heard my sniffling on the stairs.

And the second sign: my father gave me a folded piece of paper with an email address on it. The next day, he was gone, all the way on the other side of the world. I cried the whole night.

I’m not sure grandfather will ever stop being angry at my father, but he couldn’t refuse when I asked for his help sending my first email. He set me up at his workstation. His chair nearly swallowed me; the bulky computer whirred underneath. He pointed at the monitor and showed me how to compose a message, and because he’s grandfather, he taught me how my message would be encoded and passed along cables that lined the ocean floors, connecting Cambridge to Shanghai, and how there were well-established protocols to ensure my email reached my father safely.

I sent my father a message, and when he replied, moments later, saying he missed me, that was it: I was in love with technology. I loved the idea of my little stream of words bouncing around the world’s servers, being guided to their destination. I loved the way grandfather described the sending protocols and receiving protocols, like they were little guards hanging out waiting to ferry my note, even though I was just some inconsequential kid missing her dad. Computers can do anything, I thought.