A rebel without a clue.

He woke before the house did. The hour sat lightly on the rooms, the sort of hour that doesn’t announce itself. His mother slept. The Airbnb guest slept. The dog was not yet with him. He stood at the bay window and let the day arrive without interpretation. Roofs, a rinsed sky, the far-off hum of the motorway—movement everywhere, but not here. He noticed the difference. How motion could happen without arrival. How people could be in a place and not be there at all. Earlier in the week he’d watched men in lycra bolt uphill, talking as if tethered to an invisible machine. Healthy, yes—but absent. The body doing, the mind elsewhere. He felt the faint grief of it, not judgement, just the ache of contact missed. The hum of traffic before six came back to him. All that early movement to shift things from one container to another so other things could be had. He felt the sadness of it—the endless doing that keeps the machine upright and fear fed. He prayed quietly that peace would be allowed ...

I am mending. Slowly, without ceremony. The work isn’t loud or heroic; it’s a bath running, clothes drying on the rack, the small sound of order returning. Life doesn’t need to announce itself; it just starts breathing again through these ordinary acts. It’s sufficient. Outside, the morning gathers. School run, buses, the bolt of nine o’clock. I step into the flow and let it pass through me. The Umbra pulls its fractions together, the world tightening for another day. I keep walking. The scent of camphor drifts from an old coat on the bus — mothballs, the perfume of another age. It’s not unpleasant, just misplaced, a trousseau loosened into the present. The smell takes me back to  One Hundred Years of Solitude  — that same mingling of decay and grace, as if time itself had a fragrance. Márquez knew: everything returns, even the air. My father served, like his father before him. The empire’s long tail — Osnabrück, Malaya, Benghazi. He spoke little of it, only once about a crash...