When people ask me what my new novel is about, I find myself staring into the void between heartbeats, searching for words to describe the indescribable. “It’s fiction,” I say, and watch as relief flickers across their faces. They think they understand now, not realizing that “fiction” is just another word for the truths we’re too afraid to call reality.

I could tell them it’s about a woman named Ivaila Fenix who buys a motorcycle and learns to navigate quantum realities. But that would be like trying to explain the color of regret to a blind fish swimming in an ocean of night. How do you convey the weight of silence or the sound of a soul fracturing across infinite possibilities?

Some nights, I dream of Ivaila riding her motorcycle through a cityscape that breathes and shifts like a living organism. The buildings lean in, whispering secrets in voices that sound like the hum of fluorescent lights. She never speaks in these dreams, but her silence echoes louder than any scream.

The book, I suppose, is about the horror of self-discovery. Not the gentle unfolding of personality that self-help books promise, but the violent collapse of identity under the weight of observation. Ivaila’s journey is a Schrödinger’s experiment of the soul, where she is simultaneously whole and shattered, brave and terrified, until the moment she dares to look inside the box of her own making.

There are institutions in the story, looming and Kafkaesque, that might be hospitals or universities or the rigid structures of society itself. They cast long shadows across Ivaila’s path, shadows that sometimes detach themselves and follow her, nipping at the heels of her motorcycle with teeth made of bureaucratic paperwork and societal expectations.

In the end, I tell them, it’s a love story. Not between people, but between a woman and the myriad versions of herself scattered across infinite realities. It’s about the terror of reaching out to those selves, of daring to speak to them, of the silent scream that builds in your throat when you realize that understanding yourself means destroying the comforting illusions you’ve lived with for so long.

And as I explain all this, I see the confusion in their eyes, the polite smiles that don’t quite reach their mouths. They nod and say it sounds interesting, but I can see the relief in their posture when they walk away, grateful to return to a reality where books have clear genres and identities are fixed, immutable things.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I see a flicker of recognition in someone’s gaze. A moment where the veil between realities thins, and they glimpse the vast, terrifying freedom that comes with acknowledging the quantum nature of self. Those are the ones who will truly read Ivaila’s story, who will ride with her through the dark night of the soul, chasing a dawn that may or may not exist.

And in those moments, I remember why I wrote the book in the first place – not to be understood, but to create a mirror in which the right reader might catch a glimpse of their own infinite possibilities, and tremble at the sight.

If you’re intrigued by Ivaila’s quantum journey through reality and self, you can find more information about this novel on My Books page.