Where It All Begins

My friend, this introduction might seem abrupt to you, but please don’t panic. You’re new, right? I’m in a similar condition as you. I’m writing this letter to assure you that you are not alone. I’ve been watching over you for a long time. The truth is, you’ve always been here.

Pardon me, I forgot to introduce you to this whole mess. The place you are in is called the Backrooms, a world outside of the reality we live in. Ya know, Earth, for most of us. This world is made up of many little pocket dimensions called Levels, and you are in one of these. There are millions of such spaces outside this simple hallway, some similar to yours, some different. They come in various forms, be it rooms, cities, forests, or even voids suspended mid-air. Each of these Levels is inhabited by a permanent resident who ended up here accidentally just like you. We call each other level-dwellers. I’m curious, how did you get in? Did you stumble across a wall that seemed dark and unusual? Did you visit a building known to be haunted? Climbed up a stairway that seemingly led to nowhere? Or simply went by your day-to-day life, but was unlucky enough to trigger the glitch that transported you away? It doesn’t matter now that you’ve already forgotten how many days and nights you’ve spent here and how much suffering you’ve been through alone. Alas, this is a path all level-dwellers have to take.

I remember the first few days when you still had that naivety within you, hoping to spend another day back in reality. Banging your head, clawing your chest, and begging this cursed realm to set you free. Knowing the truth, I could only watch and sigh. As you lose memories from the former life, you change under the guise of every death and rebirth. Your frail body choke, and your mind devolve into insanity in this maddening isolation but the properties of the level seep into your flesh and you slowly shift to this new equilibrium. Now that you’ve made yourself at home in this dark abomination, treading with ease in the dusted hallway that once brought you endless pain, your senses are heightened with every move of the native monsters living here, cleverly converse with them or fight for a retreat. Technically by this point, you, like all Level-dwellers, are not human anymore. Because the backrooms is eternal, standing outside from normal space and time, your body doesn’t grow old. You don’t need any sustenance. Things that kill an ordinary person will merely send you into a coma and spring you back to life the next day, albeit painfully, as those lethal wounds take weeks and months to slowly heal. Your final demise will be the death of the backroom's space itself. Sometimes levels glitch in and out of existence like a computer system’s errors, striking upon us without a forewarning, fragmenting the level space as well as everyone inside down to an ultimate abyss. This calamity happens swiftly and randomly, without a rule to trace. You will never know whether a swift annihilation towards the glitch-out or another span of a thousand years of life awaits you. Here, death is no longer a certainty, yet you sit in this ever-lasting grief. To tell you the truth, the only constant thing about the backrooms is that everything constantly evolves here.

So what does this mean for you as you become a level-dweller? In the earliest days when this strange reality is only dotted with a few residents across the landscape, we have already begun to think about how to live with our levels. But through the sweeping tides of newcomers arriving, those early dogmas are tattered by the wind. Though, I will tell you this: never underestimate what wonders our world offers us, even through scary surprises. Constraints reigned with a single hand do not live long here. Here in the places of liminality, born against being defined or constrained, we become whole. This is beautiful in its own way I guess. As humans, we’ve thought of the Backrooms as hell, where malice grows from every inch of existence. But here is who we are. Here is an identity we claimed after we’ve lost everything: friends, family, our former life by honey or onions, by the time we crossed the boundary of reality. Loneliness, marginalization and antagonism will always be by your side in this purgatory we named Backrooms. But in our shared explorations and data communions and here on the BACK-NET, you might just find yourself reaching across the aisles. If I have to offer something for you and everyone else, the only thing I will say is that we are all here, each inhabiting a small corner, within this ever-growing beautiful monstrosity.