It goes back a long way, back to the very end of the century, after the ‘short twentieth’ had clinched its narrative arc with the tumbling of the Wall and the sundering of a union.

A moment of epiphany, late on in things, made genesis. One girl’s hope amid the vortex, one woman’s struggle against the days.

I had the notion that the century itself may serve as adversary. It’d be born, become teenage, and roar in its twenties, until, erupting in fury, it faded to beige. It’d decline to dance to the calendar’s tune, would inherit and bequeath in its own good time. Overlapping lives might twist and intertwine, like plaits tripping to the spring of a youthful step.

I worked back then, for a living, and the kernel stayed softly nourished. If it poked its way through the surface, I made the odd note. Mainly, though, I waited – and hoped that her century lay in wait for me.