Writing around the feeling

Every story in Perpetūra chases the same thing, and I still can’t tell you what it’s called. You know it, though. It arrives without a reason: you’re standing in some perfectly ordinary moment, a kitchen, a bridge in the evening, and something in you tips. A homesickness with no home behind it. Gone before you can look at it properly. Language keeps words near it, and none of them fit; I’ve tried them all on. The game began the day I gave up trying to name that feeling and decided to write it instead. Everything since has been a way of pointing at it sideways.

Five women, five ways of not saying it

The feeling doesn’t change. The woman carrying it does, and that changes everything about how it shows up.

Hyunjae, in Joseon Korea in 1742, runs her whole world through precision. Composure, for her, is a craft, not a mask, and she’s genuinely good at it. So the feeling comes to her as the one thing in a well-kept life that refuses to go where it should. She keeps filing it. It keeps not fitting. Watching a careful woman meet something that will not be careful back is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.

Reine is the most looked-at woman in Paris in 1893, and she earned that on purpose. The performance is real work and she’s brilliant at it. But there’s a woman standing just behind the performance, watching it happen, and the feeling lives in the gap between the two. Everyone in the city can describe Reine. Almost no one has met her.

Liuyan doesn’t think in rooms or mirrors. She’s a blade for hire in Tang dynasty China, around 750, and her discipline lives in her body, in a hand that has never once hesitated. The feeling reaches her the only way it can: physically. A hesitation where none should be. She can’t out-think it, so she has to stand still and let it happen, which for her is the hardest thing in the world.

There’s a fourth woman on the shelf now, set in the present day, closer to you than the others, and I’m telling you almost nothing about her. Even her name is sealed; I’ll come back to that. A fifth is still to come. I know her already; you’ll meet her when she’s ready.

The same feeling needs different rooms

Readers sometimes ask why the stories are shaped so differently — why one barely leaves a single household while another crosses deserts and years. The honest answer is that the feeling made me do it. Written into five versions of the same life, it would teach you a lot about the lives and not much about the feeling. Move it to another century, hand it to another temperament, and whatever stays constant starts to glow.

Hyunjae’s story holds still because her feeling is quiet, and it needs silence around it to be heard at all. Liuyan’s story moves because hers only surfaces when the body finally stops, so the body has to be given a long way to travel first. Reine’s happens in crowded rooms, since hers is the loneliness that specifically requires other people. I’ve come to think of the eras less as settings than as instruments. Same note, different resonance.

You act, and then you live inside it

When you make a choice in Perpetūra, you choose what she does, in her own voice. She burns the letter or keeps it. You’re never asked to pick a destination; you’re asked to act, and then you live inside what the acting makes. Nobody hands you the ending in advance.

And every story has a path where she ends up answering to no one but herself. I wrote those endings with the same care as any love story, and sometimes with more, because the feeling these women carry isn’t a hole shaped like a lover, and pretending otherwise would have made the entire game a lie. Some women walk out of their stories alone and entirely intact. Readers keep telling me those endings are the ones that stay with them.

The sealed thing

There’s something running underneath all of this that the game will never tell you outright. It’s been there since the first chapter of the first story, in plain sight if you know where to look. I’m not going to gesture at what it is. The fourth story goes furthest: she arrives with her name sealed, and it stays sealed until you’ve read enough to meet her properly. People ask me to just say it; I’d sooner tell you how a novel ends in the dedication. The finding-out is part of the reading. What I can promise is that it isn’t a trick. It’s a feeling, kept.

The game gives most to the reader who slows down and lets the sentences do what they’re quietly doing. Somewhere in one of these stories, a line is going to describe something you’ve felt and never said out loud. That moment is the entire project. And if the feeling turns up while you’re reading, unannounced, the way it does: hello. That’s the one.