Despair is ordinary as joy; ordinary as in ordered, regular, customary, usual; ordinary as flowers, ordinary as eggs for breakfast, ordinary as an afternoon nap, a plummet into unmotivated exhaustion, a swoon. My therapist reminds me that everyone is under continuous stress, becoming habituated to it, stress a thin sheet of ice to plunge through at the least provocation. Tears are always close, and so is numbness in the face. But the spring comes on, and nature, though mutilated, is undeterred. And something in me answers that nature, that mutilation, that flower seemingly oblivious on its stem, on my shelf.