It felt like the opposite, like finally writing down a number I had been carrying in my head for so long that I had stopped being able to read it.

People think of record-keeping as a cold activity, the opposite of feeling, and I understand why, because that is how it looks from outside.

But there was nothing cold about the clear plastic sleeve I slid those pages into that night.

It was the warmest, most self-respecting thing I had done in three years.

To write a thing down is to say it happened, and to say it happened is to stop letting other people decide whether it did.

For three years I had kept no record of my own faithfulness, had trusted that the faithfulness itself would be seen and counted, which is the trust of a child, the belief that being good is self-evident and does not need documenting.