I wished for a different ending. A different plot. It was a story then, sad and yet morbidly exciting because my mother was a part of it. But later I came to see it was also a sort of therapy, the way my mother kept on telling it over and over, as her mother had done for years. And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word
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