Baranka Books/Brasa di Alma/Things I Tell Myself
A standalone novelette
Things I Tell Myself
Grief · denial · the mind that protects itself
A man left in the spring and never came back.
But the flowers keep arriving. There is a message on the phone she hasn’t played. Some mornings his coffee waits on the counter, still warm. He is finding his way back to her, slowly, the way he always said he would — and she has learned to be patient.
Things I Tell Myself is a quiet, unsparing novelette about a woman alone in the house she once shared, and the small daily work of surviving what she cannot afford to know. Told in a voice that never raises itself, it moves through the wreckage of one love and the fierce, inventive tenderness of a mind protecting itself from its own grief — until the story she has been telling can no longer hold.
Spare, cold, and quietly devastating, it is a book about the difference between healing and hiding — and how rarely, from the inside, anyone can tell the two apart.
A standalone novelette from Brasa di Alma — complete in a single sitting.
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Content note
This book deals with grief, an abusive relationship, and depression, including a depiction of suicidal ideation. It is handled without sensation, but may be difficult for some readers.
