Confessions of Thomas Fuller

I couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed and made a list of all the good things I'd done in my life and all the bad things I'd done.

Once I'd seen on paper that I'd done more good things than bad, I went back to bed.

The bed however had become a confession box, a small space made of wood and Catholicism, and I was visited there by sins I'd forgotten and chided for omitting them from my list. I felt unremittingly responsible for the way my life had turned out, that feeling almost immediately accompanied by the feeling that the world had turned out badly with me in it, so I tossed and turned some more until I got out of bed a second time.

Now sitting in the big green chair downstairs alone in the dark, I came to understand that my greatest sin was self-consciousness, and from this self-consciousness a kind of weird pride had grown in me, often mistaken for narcissism by those less adept than I in detecting the nuances of a neurosis.

It was 3:27 a.m. the time of night when my breathing followed the first line of a poem toward the light that was on in a room that's never before been part of the house.

I could hear silence talking to itself. Its voice was a long scream followed by two soft shouts and then a sound I'd never heard before that seemed to last forever. It was my confession, being presented to me by a power far greater than myself.

Night had taken its heart out and given it to me.