A rebel without a clue.

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...