For the kind of reader who still keeps unread books on her bedside table on purpose. Written from a flat overlooking a square, mailed everywhere.
The desk at 7:14, with the second cup almost gone.
I have been ending my workday in the middle of a sentence for sixteen working days now. I picked the habit up in March, second-hand, from a friend of a friend who paints. He told me at a dinner I had almost not gone to that he stopped finishing canvases on purpose, that he liked walking up to a slightly-unfinished thing in the morning more than he liked walking up to a blank one. I went home and tried it, sceptically, on the next Tuesday's draft.
I had, until that point, been a finisher. I closed sentences. I closed paragraphs. I closed laptops. The cost of this was that every morning I sat down to a small, polite, terrifying nothing — the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next essay, all blank and all judgemental. I would, on average, spend the first forty minutes of every working day making coffee, refolding a tea-towel I had already refolded, and reading a single article I had already read.
The fix was almost embarrassing in its smallness: I stopped finishing.
What I have noticed, sixteen days in, is that the unfinished sentence is doing two kinds of work. It is, first, a small, generous handhold — a place to start that is not blank. But it is also, second, a held secret. The unfinished sentence has been thinking, all night, without me. By morning it has a small amount of momentum I did not put there. It is not, exactly, written by someone else. It is written by an older, calmer, slightly less anxious version of me who was given the night off and used it to think a little.
It is two rooms wide, three deep, and has, by my count, eleven hundred books. The owner, Inês, says she has not added a shelf in nine years. Things she throws out, things she keeps, and what she said when I asked her about Joan Didion.
I bought the cheapest hardback I could find in February and have, with two skipped days, written one page in it every morning. The handwriting is bad. The thoughts are slightly less bad than I expected.
March was a difficult month at the desk. I wrote three pieces that did not work, in three different ways, and I think I now understand why. A short post-mortem of the pieces that never went out.
Hannah, who is older by a year and a half and braver by a margin I have not yet calculated, asked me at lunch what I would still do if no one ever read it. The honest answer surprised both of us.
"I read three newsletters. Margot's is the one I read in full, while the kettle is on, before the others. There's no algorithm in it. That is the entire point."
— Esther W., reader since 2021