A Trousseau

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 on the Autobahn after seeing the Beatles in Hamburg. Vodka, he said, saved his life. He lost his teeth but not his humour. Another time he mentioned Hiroshima — convalescence after being shot in Korea, though the dates never quite aligned. It wasn’t a lie, just bravado. The past had to be shaped into something he could stand to tell.

He was an angry man. A bright boy sent to the coalface when he should’ve gone to grammar school. Fury became his language, learned from a father who’d known the same. The line of men who worked and fought instead of speaking. His story echoes Hanley’s Boy — Liverpool, labour, the sea as escape and sentence. Tragedy made common.

I’ve made peace with his ghost. He was cornered by a world that feared his potential; I can see that now. The silence he kept wasn’t emptiness, it was defence. And I carry it differently — as understanding, not armour.

The thought expands: billions of boys and girls crushed by poverty, by duty, by the blind watchmaker’s indifferent design. Out of the hundred and seventeen billion who’ve ever lived, only a few are remembered. The rest are dust folded into dust, unspoken but not gone.

I find myself thinking of them when I pass old graves leaning into time. Names fading, stone split, moss reclaiming the letters. I pause and wonder who they were. That wondering is its own prayer — a moment of borrowed remembrance, life acknowledging life. The mending continues, quietly, through me.