LENA

I had been very good at doubting myself.

I had been, over the long and specific accumulation of years in which the doubting had been the specific and practical survival strategy of a woman in an environment that rewarded doubt and penalized certainty, exceptional at it.

I sat with the roses and I thought about the doubt.

I thought about what the doubt had cost me, in the specific and honest accounting of a woman who was now doing the accounting she had been not-doing for a long time. I thought about the particular and concrete things I had not pursued because the doubt had converted them from things...