The First Thing I Ever Xeroxed
The smell was the first thing that hit me: that warm, acrid, almost chemical scent of ozone and hot toner. I was thirteen, standing in the back room of my father’s small-town office, a place of filing cabinets and buzzing fluorescent lights. My mission, self-appointed and trembling with importance, was to use the photocopier for the first time. Not to duplicate a school permission slip or a parent’s tax form, but to make a copy of a story I had written.
It was a terrible story, of course. A clichéd fantasy epic scrawled in a spiral-bound notebook, its pages filled with heroes whose names ended with unnecessary apostrophes and kingdoms I had borrowed from books I loved. But in my hands, that notebook felt like a raw, precious ingot. The act of writing it had been a private, almost furtive magic. But to copy it? That felt like an act of publishing.
I remember the weight of the lid as I lifted it, the glass platen cool and smudged. I placed my notebook carefully, pressing the spine flat to avoid that dreaded black line of shadow down the center of the copy. I fed a crisp, blank piece of paper into the tray, its potential terrifying. I hit the large, green button. The machine whirred to life with a hum that built into a grinding roar. A bar of intense green light began its slow, deliberate journey across the glass, and I watched, mesmerized, as it seemingly swallowed my words.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then, from a hidden depth, the paper emerged. It was warm. It carried with it the ghost of my handwriting, now rendered in a perfect, impersonal, machine-made purple. It was no longer just my story. It was a document. It had been processed, formalized, and made real in a way the notebook alone could never be.
That single sheet of paper represented my first, most fundamental understanding of audience. I hadn’t shown the copy to anyone. The audience, in that moment, was simply a future version of myself. I had created an artifact that existed separate from the act of its creation. The original was a messy, living thing, covered in cross-outs and margin notes. The copy was clean, final, and authoritative. It was proof that the thing had been made.
I think of that moment often when I hit ‘publish’ now. The mechanisms have changed, but the quiet, internal ceremony remains the same. That Xerox copy was my first lesson in the space between the creator and the creation. It taught me that to make a copy is to make a commitment. It is to say that the private thought is now a public object, however small that public may be. It is the moment the welder steps back, the gardener stops pruning, and the work is left to stand on its own, warm from the machine, waiting in the tray.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: