What was it that I was thinking of? Something about the world and its vain promise of the present. Why had I believed in it? Choice, the individual, the world and what it made possible on the one hand; and us, the family, on the other. For my parents, the world out there would never be the world they knew, that could never be put back, no. But as for myself, I recognised in the end something behind the brand-newness of the world, a shadow just visible beneath its seams. Here I was, sitting in my brother’s garden, after all that effort, all those years, nothing any different, the underlying
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