It's unfinished in the sense that it's a work in progress. All around are loose ends, projects half begun (or even half finished), things not quite thrown away.
I am fascinated by this sort of detritus, writ large across the estate but writ smaller (in the various but usually tiny incarnations of my handwriting) across A4 sheets, post-it notes, the backs of envelopes, tissues, whatever I've had to hand at the time. And, more recently, 'written' in countless text files -- digital artefacts which somehow manage to retain some of the spirit of those torn scraps of paper in their forms and names: the descriptive (or optimistic) .txt and .html files, the tentative .tmp, the files with no extension, filenames with cryptic sets of initials, long filenames full of underscores... archive.tmp, README__list, lj_bio_1.txt, oxbridge-and-self-worth_2.tmp, loose_ends. The names made perfect sense at the time but now I can't tell whether archive.tmp is about archiving, for archiving, already archived. With the paper, it's easier to learn the shape and colour of the fragments and lists: that large pink post-it note with GRAND PLAN (among other things), the torn-off white scrap that just says weltenschaum (did I mean weltenschau?) -- I've carried them around for so long that they're like an inbox full of scars. With the text files, it's easier to search through them for a specific word (if I can remember it), but they're more flat, all the same size; with a standard directory listing of just filenames they have barely any weight or shape to distinguish them.
On reading some of these files, I often can't remember whether I've already used the text on LiveJournal. Sometimes I can't remember what I was talking about at all. Sometimes the text sounds confident and assured, and I'm surprised I wrote it so well. Perhaps I didn't.
Our house is cluttered with adjectives and slightly verb-stained nouns.
Sometimes I feel as though I'm carrying round boxes half-full of failure. Other times they're boxes half-empty of plans.
