It’s a little bit too early in the midnight hour for the government to worth. But wasn’t Europe herself always such a company — intangible, imagined, yet binding?

Welcome to Europe, the sign read. Not as geography, not as dominion, but as a fragile etymology: a word that had once meant broad face, a continent stretching its gaze toward both sunrise and sunset.

Peace, elusive, was never inherited — it was accrued, like interest. Shackled to her mother by frugality, she learned that love in woefully reduced circumstances is still love, though distorted by necessity. The mother became perverted, her embrace a ledger, her lullabies tallies of what had been lost and what might yet be spared.

This short century — prescient in its violence, deflationary in its memory — left the soil restless. The war would never be vanquished; it lived in the hedgerows, in the ashes, in the gardener’s bumbling antics that drew much audience laughter, but beneath the comedy lay grief.

Europe, then, wished to be neither frugal nor profligate, but something rarer: undreary. A space where the road is not paved by conquest but by communion. Where allegiances are not shackles but invitations.

The alternative route was always there, hidden like a path in a maze: not to dominate, not to retreat, but to weave difference into a fabric that resists the tearing hands of history.