The Stories We Tell Ourselves at Three in the Morning

There is a court that convenes only in the dark. It has no formal hours of operation, no scheduled sessions, no clerk who announces the proceedings or bailiff who calls the room to order. It assembles without invitation, without warning, in the specific vulnerability of the hours between two and four in the morning, when the defenses that the daylight self has spent considerable energy maintaining have been lowered by sleep and the rational mind has partially withdrawn from its custodial role and the interior is left in the particular condition of unguarded exposure that only the middle of the night produces. And in that condition, in that specific and temporary defenselessness, the court begins its work.