It simply closes, uniformly, on everything personal, exactly as instructed, and it closes hardest on the very things you would have given anything to let through, if only you had known they were there.

I had wanted to keep out the hurt of one woman.

I had, in the process, kept out my own son.

That is what self-protection costs, in the end, when it hardens into a system: it does not just wall off the pain you are fleeing.

It walls off the life you do not yet know is coming to find you.

Chapter 6 — The Glass Box