There’s a drawer in my house — second one down, left of the sink — that I think of as my confession booth. Inside it: a harmonica I bought with genuine intentions, a small wooden bird I started carving maybe four years ago, two library books that are not from my library, a journal with eleven pages filled and two hundred blank, and a phone charger whose purpose I can no longer identify. I open that drawer sometimes just to remind myself of who I actually am, as opposed to who I keep planning to become.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to leave things unfinished. Not the catastrophic abandonments — the broken relationships, the unkept promises — those carry their own weight and deserve more than an essay. I mean the quieter kind. The hobby that drifted. The book I put down at chapter nine. The letter I started writing to an old friend and somehow never sent. There’s a whole archaeology of half-formed intentions in most people’s lives, I suspect, and I wonder if we’re too hard on ourselves about it, or not hard enough, or both at once depending on the day.
Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that finishing things is a virtue and leaving them unfinished is a character flaw. Productivity culture has a lot to say about this. So does a certain kind of preaching, honestly — the kind that frames every story as a completed arc, every struggle as a lesson neatly learned. But I’ve lived long enough to notice that real life doesn’t finish on schedule. Some things stay open. Some questions I’ve carried for twenty years haven’t resolved into answers so much as deepened into better questions. Maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s just what it looks like to stay curious and mortal at the same time.
The wooden bird is still in the drawer. I got the shape of the body roughly right before I stopped — you can see what it was trying to be. My grandfather carved birds like that. I think I started the project because I missed him, which means I may have been carving something other than wood all along.
I don’t know what to do with that, exactly. I’m not sure the drawer needs to be cleaned out so much as understood. Or maybe understanding it is a way of avoiding the cleaning. That’s the thing about half-finished things — they keep asking questions I’m not entirely sure I want to answer yet.