Five women, five centuries

Here is the idea underneath Perpetūra, the one everything else grew from.

Take one feeling. Not love exactly, not grief, not longing, though it borrows the shape of all three. Something unnamed, arriving from nowhere the woman can see. Now hand that same feeling to five different women in five different centuries and watch what each of them does with it.

A court woman in Joseon Korea meets it with composure. A performer in Belle Époque Paris meets it behind a public face. A swordswoman in Tang China meets it in her body before her mind ever gets a vote. The feeling does not change. The women do, and so the eras become instruments: the same note, played through different wood, and each time it resonates somewhere new.

Three of them are on the shelf now. A fourth just arrived. The fifth is still being written.