I wrote the stories in The Lost Histories underground.
In a windowless room inside a homeless shelter, where time forgot to exist, where day and night bled into the same fluorescent twilight, where I could sleep sixteen hours straight and wake unsure if I had lost a day or a lifetime.
I had grown up believing a shelter would be the end of everything. Rock bottom. The place you went when you had failed at being human.
But that small locked room became my sanctuary, a place where I could finally stop swimming against the current long enough to understand that sometimes drowning is just another way of learning to breathe.
The walls echoed with voices I could not quite decipher, conversations bleeding through concrete like prayers through cathedral stone. I would lie on my narrow bed with my three-year-old daughter curled against me like a question mark, typing these stories into my phone’s cracked screen while she colored on donation paper, both of us creating worlds in a room suspended outside of time itself.
Anger came first. Anger at being separated from everything I owned except one laundry basket of clothes. Anger at rules dictating when I could eat, sneaking granola bars into my room like contraband, disposing of wrappers like evidence of crimes against institutional order.
My family was angry too. They could not understand why I would choose that windowless room over their spare beds, that rigid schedule over their flexible concern. But sometimes safety is not found in familiar places. Sometimes it hides in the anonymous walls of strangers, in the blessed distance from those who love you too much to let you break properly.
Sometimes the only way to recover is to step outside the architecture of obligation and memory, to find a room where no one knows your name well enough to call you back to who you used to be.
Anger, I learned, makes excellent ink.
I worked weekends as a newly graduated nurse, night shifts that bled into morning, still learning how to save lives while I could not quite save my own. Then Monday would come and I would return to my underground room, to my timeless cave, and I would sleep. And sleep. And sleep. Dissociating into dreams so deep I would forget I had a body, forget I had a name, forget everything except the ache of existing.
Until the writing began.
In that timeless underground place where day and night meant nothing, where meals happened whether you were hungry or not, where sleeping for twenty hours was both symptom and cure. I wrote gods who understood what it meant to be exiled for your own good, who knew that sometimes the greatest mercy is distance, who learned that love and destruction often wear the same face.
These stories saved me from dissolving completely into that fluorescent nowhere. They gave me something to do with my hands besides scroll numbly through a phone that connected me to nothing. They transformed dissociation into creation, anger into art, the echo of incomprehensible voices into the music of divine catastrophe.
Now I live above ground again, in a place with windows where time moves normally, where I can eat whenever I want and the judgments come less frequently. But I carry that underground room with me: that perfect nowhere where these stories were born, where my daughter and I existed in our own pocket universe, where the shelter’s rigid structure held me together just long enough to remember who I was becoming.
We are all underground sometimes, writing by the light of phones with cracked screens.
These stories were born in the dark, underground, in a place outside of time.
Just like gods.
Just like hope.
Just like me.
—Mileena Rayne
Written in the light now
But forever grateful for the dark