"Cenzo Rena said that no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life."—All Our Yesterdays, Natalia Ginzburg

It is a Monday, and I have squirreled my self away in my wee office, more like a closet stuffed with books and boxes containing prints and letters and notebooks and photo albums, things left unpacked since I moved to this small town maybe 7 years ago. These things have stayed in their boxes for so long, they no longer feel like my belongings; they belong to some other woman, with her own strange and unfulfilled dreams.

The closet is also furnished with a large desk, an unused filing cabinet, two bookcases I assembled in the month the father-in-law went to hospital and died there, and a velvety olive-green armchair under paper bags full of documents that hasn't yet gone to rack and ruin, despite incursions of damp and occasional fungal colonies. Looking around, I think, this is like my mind: dusty and cluttered and not a little unloved.

In my book-closet, I smoke too much and read a novel, pausing to hack up the rest of my lungs. But I don't care. I don't care to take care of myself, for it has been a troubled spring. It feels like it's been ages since I felt well; I have a poor sense of time, and a week often feels like a year.

God, I'm impatient for a future in which I felt joy every day, not a lot of joy even, small, modest joys, okay, and I start to despair a little and think I might die from the wanting of that future. I might die, I think, I might even kill myself, and I start to imagine it. But I don't like guns (too messy and fiddly), or nooses (too alarming), or pills (I'd like to keep a clear head as I die, thank you), or knives (I'd probably faint at the sight of so much blood).

So there is, at this point, only the option to cultivate a little courage even if one has never thought of oneself as having any courage, and to stop hiding in book-closets, behind books and cigarette smoke, and make something of this spring, as troubled as it has been.

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