That, in a nutshell, was the end of my preoccupation with death. Not that I stopped fearing it. I just stopped thinking about it. If I’d had any extra time on my hands that wasn’t spent thinking about Alma, I might have spent them worrying about death. But the truth was that I learned to put a wall up against such thoughts. Each new thing I learned about the world was a stone in that wall, until one day I understood I’d exiled myself from a place I could never go back to. And yet. The wall also protected me from the painful clarity of childhood. Even during the years when I hid in the forest,
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