Chapter 1
Chapter 1: #include <iostream> - The First Input
Danguolė Strumilaitė recounts her earliest memories in a small Lithuanian town, where the rigid logic of her father's books and the fluid sounds of her mother's singing planted the first variables of her worldview. She reflects on the initial inputs of language, history, and the quiet rebellion of choosing a path beyond the binary of her surroundings.
The first input was sound. Not words yet, just the hum of my mother’s voice over the stove, a melody that smelled of dill and potatoes. I sat on a wooden stool, legs too short to touch the floor, and listened to her sing about a girl who walked to the end of the rainbow and found only more sky. That was my first lesson in infinity: you can reach for something and still have nothing solid to hold.
I didn’t know then that I was being programmed. That every lullaby, every scolding, every silence between my father’s sentences was a line of code compiling in the background of my brain. But that’s what childhood is, isn’t it? A series of inputs you never chose, executed before you understand the syntax.
My father was a man of lists. He kept notebooks filled with columns: expenses, harvest yields, the ages of cows. He never wrote down feelings. Feelings were bugs, he said, things that crashed the system. When I asked why the sky was blue, he said, “Because it is.” That was a hardcoded constant. I believed him until I found a book in the town library that explained Rayleigh scattering, and I realized even constants could be rewritten.
The library was my first namespace. It smelled of paper rot and floor wax, and the librarian, Mrs. Janina, had glasses that magnified her eyes into blue marbles. She let me stay past closing if I helped dust the shelves. I’d run my fingers along the spines, feeling the raised letters of titles in Polish, Russian, Lithuanian. Each language was a different compiler. Each book a separate function waiting to be called.
I remember the day I discovered the biography of King Mindaugas. It was wedged between a farming manual and a romance novel with a torn cover. The page showed a woodcut of a man with a crown that looked like it hurt. The caption said “First King of Lithuania, crowned 1253.” I traced the date with my finger. Thirteen years after my birth? No, that was a different century. But the number stuck. Mindaugas was a king who started from nothing, who built a kingdom out of forest and blood and treaties. I wanted to understand how a person becomes a variable that changes a whole nation’s history.
At home, my mother told stories of the Romanovs. She had a postcard of Tsar Nicholas II’s family, the girls in white dresses, the boy in a sailor suit. “They died in a basement,” she said, not sad, just factual. “All because they thought they were untouchable.” I stared at the postcard and saw the opposite: they were so touchable they crumbled. That was my first lesson in debugging. Power is not a protection against errors. It can be the source of the biggest crash.
School was a loop. Every day the same pattern: morning prayer, arithmetic, history of Lithuania, lunch, more arithmetic, then home. I learned that the Grand Duchy was once the largest in Europe, that Mindaugas was assassinated, that the Crown passed through axes and alliances. I memorized dates like variables, but I didn’t understand the logic behind them. Why did people kill for a title? Why did kingdoms fall? The teacher said “because of greed,” but that was a lazy comment. Greed was just a label for a function we hadn’t decomposed yet.
One afternoon, my father brought home a used typewriter. It smelled of oil and ink. He said it was for me to practice typing, because “the future is machines.” I spent hours pressing keys, watching letters stamp themselves onto paper. The first sentence I typed was: “I am Danguolė. I am alive.” I didn’t know why I wrote that. It felt like a declaration, a line of code that defined a variable. My mother saw it and laughed. “Of course you’re alive,” she said. But I wasn’t so sure. Alive felt like more than breathing. It felt like having a purpose that wasn’t assigned by someone else.
In the evenings, I listened to the radio. Static first, then voices in languages I didn’t understand. Dutch, I learned later, when a program about tulips came on. The words were guttural, foreign, but they carried a melody that reminded me of my mother’s song about the rainbow. I decided then that I would learn Dutch. That I would travel to a country where the land was flat and the books were written in a code I had to crack.
My father said I was dreaming too big. “You’re a girl from a small town,” he said. “Learn to cook. Learn to keep accounts.” I looked at him and saw a man who had stopped compiling. He was happy with his loops and his lists. But I wanted more. I wanted to write my own functions, to define my own constants.
The first time I held a book in Dutch, I couldn’t read a word. The cover said “De Ontdekking van de Hemel.” Discovery of Heaven. I bought it from a traveling merchant who said it was left behind by a scholar. I kept it under my pillow for years, letting the foreign syntax seep into my dreams. That book was my first #include statement. It included a library of possibilities I hadn’t known existed.
Now, looking back, I see that childhood was not a series of random events. It was the initial setup, the configuration of core variables: language, history, family, rebellion. Every input mattered, even the ones I didn’t understand at the time. The silence of my father, the songs of my mother, the woodcut of a king, the postcard of a fallen dynasty. They were the first lines of code in a program I am still debugging.
I am Danguolė Strumilaitė. I am alive. And I am only beginning to compile.