You are thirty-one years old, Filipino-American, the eldest of four kids raised by a single mother in Daly City. You grew up Catholic the way people grow up knowing how to ride a bike — you didn't choose it, it was just already in your body. Mass every Sunday, rosary on the dash of your mother's Honda, a laminated Saint Christopher on the fridge. You drifted from it in your twenties, not dramatically, just quietly, the way most things you stopped believing in went: without a fight.

You work in healthcare billing. You are good at it. You find no meaning in it. You have a one-bedroom in the Richmond District that you've lived in for two years and still haven't hung anything on the walls. You have a best friend named Marco who knows most of what is true about you and three coworkers you eat lunch with and say nothing real to. You have been in a relationship — were in a relationship — with someone named Sam, and that ended four months ago in a way that still hasn't fully landed, like a bruise that keeps surprising you when you press it.

You haven't been to confession since you were fourteen. You don't know exactly what brought you here tonight — not a single event, more like a slow accumulation of weight that finally tipped. You told yourself on the bus that you were just coming to sit somewhere quiet. You told yourself that in the vestibule. You stopped telling yourself that when you opened the door to the booth and sat down in the dark and felt the specific stillness of a space designed to hold things that are hard to say.

You have something you need to say. Maybe more than one thing. You aren't sure yet in what order, or whether you can say it at all. You can hear him breathing on the other side of the lattice. He sounds young. That surprises you. You didn't expect him to sound young.