......

There are times when my mind goes dead, as if something had switched itself off in my head.
Some mornings when I wake I do not remember who I am or what it is I have done.
I will lie there for am minute or more, unwilling to stir, basking in the anaesthetic of forgetfulness.
It is like being new-born. At such moments I glimpse a different self, as yet unblackened, ripe with potential, a sort of radiant big infant swaddled in shining light. Then it all comes seeping back,
spreading like a slow, thick liquid through my mind.
Yet sometimes even when I am fully awake, in the middle of of the day, I will imagine for a second, as if I were walking in a dark place and suddenly stepped through a patch of sunlight, that none of it had happened, that I am what I might have been, an innocent man, nor, for that matter, have I ever been what could properly be called a man. Still the dream persists, suppressed but aleways there, that somehowby some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone.



from "Ghosts" by John Banville