From within, it’s where I have met this mountain. I was simply born to know it, between the blackberries and the bushes, the nettle and the little water springs. And the narrow creeks, the cross, the silence.

Dinner was always at 7.30 pm; did I even have a watch? I wonder how I knew when the clock was striking 7.30 pm. I wonder if I even cared. I should have cared, though, because Grandma expected me to be there on time, with or without the two bags full of blackberries I picked every day. There she was, Grandma, without even saying a word, standing 50 metres from me, from us, cousins, friends, cousins’ friends, and friends’ cousins, people you knew only during summer, and you forgot during winter. She was standing there watching us and that was our clock.

‘Anna is such an introspective little girl’, people said back then. I was a loner; I could spend entire days without talking to anyone if they let me. The mountain was my favourite make-believe, just wandering there, getting lost, or pretending to, was so easy. What on earth did I do there for hours and hours, before cell phones, without watches? I used to write stories about fairies and parallel worlds.

It was right up the road, then right up the hill, a five-minute walk, maybe ten minutes if you wanted to get in deeper. Deeper into those scars cut into nature; too close for me to understand properly back then. It was gigantic, the mountain, and yet it was not scary. It was electrifying, the green all around, the dark caves, the rocks beneath when you stared down from the very precarious guardrails. It was dense, wrapped in itself, thick and impenetrable. It was marvellous. That kind of nature that will always win over men.

So many things have gone wrong in those caves. So much blood and terror and despair, of children, women, men, families, spilled and spread by those who, cruelly, make fear their business. So much pain in those years, the very same years I spent there, with my t-shirts spotted with chocolate ice cream, my books, my imagination, my melancholic solitude and my made-up stories.