Crossroads

 Crossroads:

 

Before all the before-times, there was nothing. But the I appeared suddenly out of that void, tearing through time and creating the moment.

And in this tale, it turns out the I is actually you—that’s life for you!

You begin to move forward; at first, everything is pure magic, and you see the world as a spectacle you can only be a part of. You’re like a song appearing between musical notes, or like a colour painting a sunrise.

Then, a lot of people begin to carelessly place their ideas and expectations onto you, and you start to grow and petrify—just a little, just enough to play your role.

However, the stage is demanding, and little by little, you learn to defend yourself from the vicissitudes of life. You resort to mechanisms, springs that activate when a new situation resembles an old one closely enough—one where you weren't allowed to be yourself because you had to respond to the ideas and expectations of others. Thanks to those springs and mechanisms, you know what to do.

You start to feel you are those mechanisms; you start to think that, somehow, they are your personality and that it is you who operates those levers, cranks, and compasses.

You walk on and reach a crossroad.

At this crossroad stands your family. No, you couldn't choose them, but—though you don't know it yet—you will be responsible for how you react to them. It seems almost like a trap because, to a large extent, you will learn "How to React to Things™" from your family.

At this fork, you choose your friends, another important part of that learning process. In retrospect, I can tell you that you’ve been lucky—but what would have become of you if you had gone with those others of darker hearts? Then there were those others, the ones who were very economically successful in life; what became of them?

You keep walking and, once again, you encounter several paths.

Here is the moment when you decide to stay in a relationship where you aren't treated well. In reality, this decision is made of a myriad of moments stretching out in a straight line before you. Do you have the tools and the knowledge to do something else? If you don't have them, is it truly a decision?

The rest of the paths seem like illusions: in that one, the same relationship lasts a very short time; in that other one, it seems you emigrate and emigrating with your partner works; and in the one further beyond, emigrating creates a resentment that destroys you both. Of course, in most of the branches, that partner doesn't even exist, and that time has perhaps been filled with other people or matters.

You look back with curiosity, but you stumble upon the moment that relationship ends. In some realities, you jump quickly into another relationship; in others, you suffer from depression, not knowing how to navigate the grief; and on this path you are walking, you question why you accepted that treatment.

Do you see? This other path is where you flee from your actions and their consequences because you cannot face the emotional cost of understanding yourself as a person who acted this way or that—as a person who did such a thing to others or did such a thing to themselves. If you follow it, the emotional consequences of this decision will splinter, and it will be very complicated to track them down to put the puzzle pieces back together.

Down that other path, you will focus primarily on your professional life, never stopping the search for people to accompany you on the way.

Down that lonely trail, you dive into your life but gradually lose sight of those who had walked with you.

Of course, there are complicated paths. If you go down that one over there, you will change; you will kill—metaphorically—part of who you are, and you will suffer—this time in a very literal sense. But you will change, after all, because the cost of suffering the change is lower than the cost of suffering everything that would happen if you didn't change.

Look, in one fork, your friends change with you. In others, they don't.

In many others, some do and some don't.

Evidently, you cannot choose any of that, so you don't choose.

Note that along this path you learn—at the cost of not betraying yourself—that your defense mechanisms weigh too much and serve too little. That there are people you have to let go. That learning to regulate your feelings in no way means repressing them or fleeing from them by thinking up excuses, hierarchies, and whatever narrative makes you feel better than others just because—whether it's that you’re better at this or that... you already know that lie.

The lie of the I.

It is only an inflammation of the ego, somewhat annoying, but it’s one of those illnesses that kills itself off, like a fever. The treatment: courage in abundance, surpassing the limits of the imagination and what is socially accepted. Later, when courage no longer even understands where that limit was, who put it there, or what time it opens: a little bit of chocolate.

But wake up, otherwise life is going to eat you up. Down that path, yes, you start to feel all the feelings, including the negative ones. Why would anyone submit themselves to such torture? But you gain clarity, and slowly, life hurts less. Those mechanisms and springs you called your personality fall away because they are no longer useful to you.

And the feelings begin to integrate into all those gaps left by the mechanisms that are no longer there. Suddenly, you glide through life by means of living, and you begin to dance with life.

The floorboards beneath your feet sound hollow.

Suddenly, others are dancing too.

The floorboards beneath their feet sound hollow.

They carry many survival mechanisms on their backs, but then again, who doesn't?

You stop in the middle of the stage; the spotlights blind you.

Then you look at the audience, but there is no one there.

In your hand is a mask; it is yours, your persona.

But that mask is made only of survival and familiarity, of fear and past.

And it doesn’t fit you anymore.

There are cracks in it, and you come with your own face—one that never had a name.

You take a bow.

And that is how masks fall: with a bow full of compassion for who we have been.

Canned applause plays, as if the sound came from an old, pre-recorded cassette tape.

"Who are you?" life asks you, speaking to you for some reason from the proscenium, perhaps interested.

The night ripples like a blanket spreading through the air and comes to a still, creating a landscape of black hills dotted with twinkling stars. There is a trail breaking through them, a moonbeam, marking a path that no one can travel, save for the night itself.

"Who are you?" life insists, expectant.

And your only answer is a question mark.

 

    Crossroads  © 2026 by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

 

Dungeoneering

Dungeoneering:

 

Shelyn had several years of experience looting ruined dungeons—or at least snatching whatever scraps she could salvage from them—so when that stone slab closed behind her, she didn’t lose her cool.

True, she didn’t like having overlooked a trap; but she couldn’t locate the slab or the mechanism that had triggered it. Logically, it should be somewhere in the chamber she now stood in.

Although the room itself made her think of some twisted kind of magic, because when she tried to light it with her torch, what she saw there was highly suspicious.

For starters, the chamber was perfectly cubic—which was strange enough in itself.

In the center there was a pedestal with a key resting on it; a couple of steps to the left of the pedestal stood a mirror, and on the far wall, a door bore an inscription that read: “Exit.”
A strange bluish, luminescent liquid coating the walls revealed more to her eyes than the torch alone could have.

Shelyn thought you didn’t need to be a professional… dungeon-delver? She wasn’t sure of the word. Dungeonist? Dungeonette? Well, whatever. The important thing was that this room was a trap.

But why such an obvious trap? The whole point of a trap was to go unnoticed until the adventurer triggered it—and then harm them.

Was this some sort of architectural sadism? If that were the case, maybe whatever had triggered the slab at her back had been in the threshold itself, meant to crush her rather than trap her. But Shelyn hadn’t done anything special to dodge it—she had simply walked inside.

She used an extendable staff to knock the key from the pedestal without touching it, but nothing happened.

Then she checked with the staff that the floor tiles and the walls didn’t hide any pressure mechanisms.

She tossed a few objects around, in case there were movement sensors of some sort, then picked them back up.

A little recklessly, she touched the key with her finger. Nothing happened. So she picked it up and tried it in the lock. It fit, but didn’t turn. She couldn’t exactly say she hadn’t seen that coming.

She took out her lockpicks—because you couldn’t go around dungeon-delving without a good set of picks—but, predictably, the lock wouldn’t budge.

After a moment’s thought, she tried opening the door without inserting a key at all, but—for whatever reason—that didn’t work either.

That left the mirror. And Shelyn knew that the combination of mirrors and forgotten, dark ruins usually led to trapped creatures from the other side of terror, dangerous journeys between strange planes of existence with no clear way home, sickly interdimensional cults—or a pretty redhead staring at you from the other side. But usually Shelyn wasn’t lucky enough to just see her own reflection.

She could swear her reflection had looked normal before, but now, of course, it was a strange version of herself: more leather, paler skin, definitely more scars, clothes dangling with too many chains, something like needles piercing her arms and forming a kind of carapace, and a threatening attitude.

Shelyn examined it with curiosity.

The creature began ramming against the mirror, fracturing it, while Shelyn watched with interest. Then the other broke through and stepped into the chamber.

“Hi. You’re not some kind of metaphor, are you?” Shelyn ventured. “I don’t like metaphors,” she tried to explain clumsily.

“That’s a strange question,” the other Shelyn replied. “Not that I know of. Are you? Can a metaphor ask another metaphor if it’s a metaphor?”

“No, and I have no idea,” the adventurer answered, confused.

“Didn’t it occur to you about the mirror?” asked the other, pointing at the gap left between two rooms that shouldn’t connect the way they did.

“No, I’m a bit slow. I thought I was the correct me, until now, that is,” Shelyn apologized.

The other Shelyn circled the mirror, glancing into it as she passed: those two rooms posed a serious geometrical problem.

“Cool, huh?” she said, grinning.

“I have an idea.” Shelyn went to what remained of the mirror, crossed through, and took the key from the other side. She tried it in the lock, and this time the door opened.
The other Shelyn was going to the same but on the other side the door was already open, of course.

Each crossed their respective door. The next room was rectangular, but now the mirror covered the entire ceiling, and each saw the other walking upside down.
The mirror wasn’t really a mirror, at least it was not reflecting them, though it mirrored the rest of the room perfectly. And fortunately, they could hear each other through it.

“Do you think this makes sense?” asked Shelyn.

“I quit drugs years ago,” the other replied, “so probably not.”

On the far wall was a small plaque in cursive script.

“This one says…” Shelyn began. “will exist? There’s even an interrogation mark.”

“This one says Does free” the other pointed out. “What do you think?”

“Is this a logical problem or an emotional one?”

“Philosophical, I think.”

“Yeah, yeah, but from which angle do we solve it?”

“Put it this way,” the other proposed. “Is our mental activity determined or not? If it is, then we don’t own it. If it isn’t, then it’s random.”

“I don’t like that idea…” Shelyn admitted.

“If our mental activity is determined,” continued the other adventurer, “then it’s determined by something in our mind or by something external. If external, then no free will. If internal, then we’re just postponing the problem. Because we can ask again: is that thing in our mind determined or random? Either way, we don’t control the situation.”

“But what the hell-ohhh…” Shelyn had always believed free will was essential, of course. Without it, you had to answer a whole host of questions about ethics, responsibility, and punishment that very smart people—though perhaps not smart enough to answer them—would have to face. And yet, free will suddenly seemed like nothing more than an illusion, shattering like that first mirror in the first chamber.

At the same time, her fear that some idiot who thought free will didn’t exist might justify any atrocity vanished, because that was the stance of someone who didn’t really grasp the matter, since the agent is always accountable and society always protects itself.

“I’m not making a point,” Shelyn said, surprised at her own words.

“What?” asked the other, intrigued.

“I mean if someone asked me what I mean, if there’s no free will…”

“Oh, yeah. I’m too old to go around making points, too,” her interlocutor agreed. “Free will doesn’t exist,” she declared theatrically.

The far wall stirred and produced a door.

Both opened it and stepped into the next room. This one was white and bright.

They were both in the same room, at the same time, in the same place—being one.

There was absolutely nothing in the room, not even the door they’d entered through.

Shelyn ran her routine tests: checking for pressure, motion, or sound sensors; for cavities, reliefs, protrusions, or any hint of seams in the smooth wall.

There was nothing.

So Shelyn—or both halves of her—sat down on the floor and began to think.

On the bright side, she wasn’t hungry, nor did her bodily functions seem active. In other words: she had all the time in the world.

At first, she thought about her situation with urgency. Then she relaxed. Then she reflected, grew bored, began questioning the meaning of her existence, who she was, what the world was, she tought silly thoughts, and cycled through those stages again and again.

After what felt like eternity, she stopped thinking, because it wasn’t taking her anywhere.

Then she relaxed into the silence.

It stretched out in every direction; who she was blurred into the walls of that chamber, and her mind became a mirror reflecting everything.

And yet, within the silence, she began to think again: her brain told her life would be very boring if there were nothing in her mind, that she couldn’t give herself up completely with all that story on her back. And that story—who she was—settled heavily on her shoulders once more.

Her fears pounced on her in a merciless struggle; doubts appeared, wounding her; terror dragged images from the past, full of darkness and of all the wrongs she had suffered or, more often, had inflicted.

But it was too late: Shelyn had already realised that her idea of herself was a strange lie no one tells anyone.

Her mistakes were her wisdom, and her pain and worries pointed to the problems she needed to resolve.

And she saw how all that darkness filling her body disappeared, leaving empty spaces that, instead of sealing, let the light shine through.

Shelyn didn’t like metaphors: you could never trust them, because they never meant exactly what they claimed to mean. To her, they had a dishonest streak, and that’s why she hated becoming one.

She valued sincerity—tempered with empathy, of course—above all else.

So she relaxed and returned to silence.

She realized words could never transmit that stillness—at best they could name it, destroying it in the process.

And she wasn’t sure, but maybe—just maybe—metaphors were a way, incomprehensible if anybody asked her, of escaping the limits of language.

Silence, in any case, struck her as the better solution: it was honest, and meant exactly what it was.

Silence felt like remembering something important, like coming home, like the calm of knowing you were where you belonged.

And so, with her body pierced by beams of light, she felt herself returning to herself.

The walls of that chamber opened, like petals in spring, and Shelyn found herself before a wooden cabin in the forest, beside a flowing brook: her home.

“Fuck me,” she muttered.

She still didn’t like metaphors: you couldn’t trust them.

 

    Dungeoneering  © 2025 by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

?

 ?:

 

Tikal’s afternoons were woven of but breeze and warm caressing her body, while her staff held the world steady before her and in every direction.

Tikal had grown, like the trees, and the wrinkles that had begun to sketch themselves across her face were learning to reveal the shape of her soul.

She set out to cross a bridge, and the river beneath it came to a halt while the bridge itself began to flow.

Tikal pressed her palms together as if to form a barrier—one that could never have stopped such a current—and burst into laughter as the bridge slipped through her fingers like water.

“They say you’re the Guardian of Water,” said a man’s voice behind her.

“What a strange name…!” Tikal exclaimed with a smile. “Water is quite good at guarding itself; it just… goes wherever it pleases. Sometimes it destroys things,” she added thoughtfully. “Do you need anything?”

“I wish to gain wisdom,” the young man replied, bowing.

“That’s easy: you just need to make mistakes.”

“There are people who make mistakes all the time and never stop repeating them,” the youth protested.

“What’s your name, dear?” asked Tikal.

“Snow.”

“A good name.” Tikal greeted him with a handshake. “You must understand—those people who seem to err endlessly are not really making mistakes. Only those of us who do err can be wise; those who don’t can only become cycles. Their fear is stronger than their curiosity. And besides, in this life there is room and time for everything—nothing remains.”

“But wouldn’t you want those people who err to learn?” the young man ventured.

“Only someone who doesn’t understand the world would want every day to be sunny,” she said in a quite vague poetic manner.

“Don’t you feel compassion for them?” he asked, incredulous and furious.

Tikal stepped closer, her warmth disarming.
“Could you mend something you didn’t know was broken?” she asked gently.

“But I do know what’s broken!” the young man objected.

“Yet you couldn’t repair what you don’t see as broken. So have compassion—for yourself and for others.” Tikal laid a hand on his shoulder. “Do not judge. Judgment robs us of empathy for whom we cannot understand.”

“And if someone I love makes a mistake and refuses to see it?”

“Then, before you try to understand the deep fear of the one who errs and refuses to see it, understand the deep fear that makes you want to control who errs and refuses to see it. Empathy…”

“Your wisdom is a fraud,” the young man spat, cutting her off with the bitter fury with undernotes of resentment of someone long disappointed.

“That is, at the very least, semantically debatable,” she replied. “But you’re right—in the end, all I do is refuse to resist life, and flow with it.”

“And you just let people you love hurt themselves?”

“Only if I’ve glimpsed a cycle they have not, and they refuse to listen,” she clarified calmly. “I cannot go around handing out life lessons. I have no grand answers: truth is nothing but a question mark, nothing more,” she apologized.

“They said you were a sage,” he muttered, frustrated.

“Wisdom is everywhere, Mister Snow. I regret with all my being not being what you’ve imagined.” Tikal bid him farewell with a deep bow, heart to heart.

Tikal used her conviction like a slide, gliding over the clouds through traces of orange, pink, and green light.

Mistakes do not lead to wisdom: wisdom is mistakes seen from the other side.

The caress of the suns tasted like chocolate, and Tikal’s laughter filled the air.

She laughed at the thought that anyone might call her a sage—it was endlessly amusing. Although… wait, perhaps she was wise, in the way trees are wise, or rivers, or squirrels…!

Then she remembered a time when she had fallen in love with someone much younger, and her master had encouraged her to confess her feelings to her loved one.

Her master—the old Yayotal—had suspected it would not work, and Tikal herself recognized the obvious: she was immature, unready for a romantic bond that required presence, uncomfortable conversations, one that wasn’t just fun and ice creams. That was why she had fixed her gaze on someone who could neither demand nor give her emotional depth.

Tikal had suffered deeply, for she was never one to repress her feelings, and she had been intensely in love. But she thanked her master for encouraging her to confess her feelings, for trusting her, because it allowed her to face the reality of her own immaturity.

If Yayotal had simply told her not to fall in love with that person, Tikal, in her immaturity, would have taken it as something merely circumstantial—and, blind to the pattern beneath that warning, she would have later fallen for someone else who would be just as unattainable.

Perhaps someone who felt no interest in her, or who was already bound to another.

The pattern was the true reason she had fallen for someone who could never be emotionally available.

Love was not wrong, but her fear of not being enough was a perspective error.

Imagine you are so lucky that life whispers to you that you are immature not through hurting or disappointing others, nor through a breakup with someone you love, but through love itself, through that immense feeling of being in love… Tikal thought. She was never going to waste an opportunity like that.

Tikal was brave: she longed for an honest world, one that would care for her, and so she strove to be sincere and empathetic.

At times she wondered what became of those poor, so formal souls who believed maturity meant repressing their feelings, as though feelings would never return. People trapped by the past, imprisoned by mistakes they could not even see—like Snow.

That business of trying to be a “serious adult” was not for Tikal.

Besides, her heart could not be broken: it was like an air bubble forced underwater, always rising to the surface despite all efforts.

Navigating between doubt and resolve, Tikal reached the Tree of the Nameless Gods, immense as the world itself, beneath which an abyss descended.

Yayotal, old and bent, awaited her patiently, playing on his wooden flute a tune that seemed to pause time itself in contemplation.

“Beautiful melody,” Tikal said.

“Thank you, though much of the merit belongs to the melody itself.” Yayotal bowed to her. “How do you feel today?”

“Well. I met a fool with a beautiful name,” she smiled. “He was trying to catch the wind in his hands,” she explained, puzzled. “But don’t bow, old man—you’re far too frail for that.”

“I think truth is not meant for everyone,” Yayotal replied.

“We can’t go around expecting from others what they cannot give themselves,” said Tikal. “Though you never know when a cycle might turn into wisdom.”

Soap bubbles floated around them, some bursting, others letting themselves be carried away by the wind.

Meanwhile, silence made its way in.

 

    ?  © 2025 by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Your reflection

Your reflection:

 

I look at that painting and feel that it’s staring back at me, or maybe it is the exhaustion, or knowing that I cannot find the right shades. Those mirrors around me are closing in, suffocating me within an asymmetrical and fragmented frame, about to rip the universe.

I put a bit of I on that canvas, but when I mix it with confidence and grandeur, I only get a delirium-shaped fear made of stone.

It’s illogical: when I dip my brush in mental strength, I solely paint the blindness of dogma.

When I apply it to emotional responsibility, I get narrow-minded excuses; none of this makes sense.

How could I strive to paint the vibrating colour of empathy to only obtain the darkest hue of judgment on that fabric?

Up to a point, I can intuit that path the paint traces, but if I draw my heart…? It is so strange… it’s a beautiful heart.

Perhaps it is rationality what’s lacking, so with an impeccable wrist movement, my brush goes to the pallette and gets soaked in rationality. I skillfully make the strokes, it cannot be that any other thing gets drawn on that canvas and yet… I can only see paralysis before me.

I try to hide inside an existence containing only myself, an absurd exercise –I should have known–, like getting tattooed to conceal my own skin, like escaping from my shadow by putting out a candle’s flame in the darkness.

Nonetheless, I hide, cowering inside me. On the outside time passes by as always: taking away what is irrelevant, and leaving what is essential.

Eons after that and still torn between fear and courage, I decide to open my eyes, but everything around stays the same.

Indeed, nothing has happened, maybe because the last thing I drew was paralysis. Perhaps I’m focusing on the wrong place and yet there is nothing else here.

However who is a variant of what and I can’t help but think about it.

I study my reflection in one of those many mirrors that bow before me in impossible angles, and that image seems to be in conflict: its silhouette constantly shifting, glitching between appearances.

It stops, fighting to reboot itself, but trapped and almost static, as if it was still trying to escape.

I stare into those eyes, that are mine.

I’m beginning to see a glimpse of something that terrifies me.

I look away, but where else would I look to? There’s only time here. Time and a myriad of mirrors.

I look at my reflection again, fear’s scent constricts my heart again, but I relax. And keep on observing.

Yes, there are things I don’t like there: mistakes, unlearnt lessons I think I know, there is a night ocean of cowardice.

There’s something I am not telling myself, a truth hidden there, in plain sight.

My reflection get distorted or maybe it gets real again.

The truth is found along with errors. It’s  clear, shinning, and painful.

The reflection is rigid, fragile, and brittle.

And the truth and my mistakes examine me.

Challenges detach themselves from destiny; they choose us and face us, and then we get to decide how do we act toward them.

I choose to destroy my self image and liberate the person within it.

I look at that fucking mirror and I shatter it.

Now I know that a good heart is not enough.

Now I undo words’ reality.

My arm bleeds and with this spilled life the colours on my palette start taking shape.

From now on my rage will be a love letter to myself.

Self-righteousness and judgment will be the opposite of understanding and empathy, which will always be side by side with boundaries.

I will walk, never again hiding from my own mistakes.

And friendship will be sacred.

Now I can create my work again while those mirrors around me start to burst. 

One by one by one.

 

 

 

Your reflection © 2025 by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0