I was sitting in the living room and ballet music filled the air, the kind you listen to without needing to know the name. Suddenly the room dissolved or maybe it opened, and I saw the stage. Dancers I had never known, performing choreography no one had taught me. There was a prima ballerina, a partner, a corps that moved like breath itself. I saw them—felt them—more vividly than memory allows. I don’t know how long the trance lasted, and some days after I told Aleli. Aleli, the one with wise eyes and a quiet voice, the one who listened not just as a friend, b ut as someone who recognized. She didn’t blink. She didn’t laugh. She said: “Hortensia, you have to write.” She didn’t mean write the ballet. She meant everything. And so we began. We never finished that novel. But we started something larger. She cracked open the door for me. And I walked through it with ink on my hands.

As in Luigi Pirandello's Play: “The characters were born alive, and they refused to be puppets. They had their own life, their own truth—and they demanded to be heard.” — Luigi Pirandello, adapted from Six Characters in Search of an Author They needed to BE, they had their own life, and I was only the means for them to become known. I wasn't writing in pixels or glowing cursors—but in the iron lungs of my father’s Underwood.

It was heavy as a relic, anchored like an altar on the desk, it waited with its spools and levers, its alphabet cast in steel. And when I touched it—when my fingers began their dance— it sang with sharp deliberate notes that echoed like a music I could feel beneath my ribs.

I had studied piano once. I remember the stretch of octaves, the ivory under tension, the aching beauty of a wrong note followed by a right one. And so I wrote on keys that struck back.

The Underwood demanded presence, precision, a kind of reverence for every mark made permanent.

Later, as the world moved forward, I moved forward with it into Technology, with capital T and I moved into silent typing. Letters now appeared like ghosts in quiet parades, without ceremony, without music. It was not the same, but I adapted. I still missed the bell at the end of the line, the pushing of the carriage. I adapted, because the urge to write was paramount.

Sometimes I wonder if my first novel exists in the ether as the sound of it being typed rather than in the story it told. A sonata for fingers and iron that only I heard in full. And if anyone should ask me now how I began as a writer—I will say this:

It began with a typewriter, and the music it taught my hands.

Aleli Said: You Have to Write
And I haven't stopped since

For ALELI