Anchoring Light
Copyright© 2026 by Danielle Stories
Prologue: Before the Fabric
There is a version of me that still exists in the space before.
She lives in the quiet hours just before dawn, when the Santa Ana winds have finally died down, and the palm trees outside my window stop their frantic, scraping dance. She lives in the gap between heartbeats, in the fraction of a second before the alarm clock screams you awake. She lives in the soft, worn cotton of an old t-shirt that I haven’t worn in years but cannot bring myself to throw away.
She is the girl I was before I understood the true weight of skin.
I used to believe that the world was made of questions. Good questions. Clean questions. Why does water boil at two hundred and twelve degrees? How does a sycamore seed know to reach for the sun? What did Rousseau mean when he wrote that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains?
I spent sixteen years collecting answers like seashells, arranging them in neat, logical rows inside the quiet museum of my mind. I thought that if I could just find enough answers, I could build a fortress strong enough to keep out the noise. The chaos. The chaos of people, with their loud laughter and their sharper silences, their rules that no one ever wrote down but everyone seemed to know.
I did not understand, then, that the most dangerous questions are not the ones you ask of books.
The most dangerous question is the one you ask of the world itself:
Why?
Why this rule? Why this agreement? Why is this particular arrangement of fibers draped over this particular body at this particular hour of this particular day?
And what happens to the girl who decides, quietly, logically, that the answer is not good enough?
I am writing this to you from the other side of that question. From the place you arrive at when you strip away everything you were told you were supposed to be, and you find, shivering and exposed, the person you actually are.
It is not a comfortable place. The air is cold. The light is unforgiving. The stares of strangers press against your bare skin like a thousand tiny needles, and there is no fabric thick enough to shield you from the weight of their judgment.
But here is the thing they do not tell you about standing naked in the fluorescent glare of a high school hallway, or a courtroom, or the stage of a prom where they never expected you to show up:
You do not have to be ashamed.