I finished something this week. I am being deliberately vague about which thing, because the entry is not about the project. It is about the part nobody warns you about: the after.
I have learned, slowly, that finishing a piece of writing is not the act it pretends to be. The act it pretends to be is a final sentence followed by a satisfying thud. The act it actually is goes something like this: you write a final sentence, you reread the last paragraph, you almost rewrite it for no reason, you walk away, you come back twenty minutes later, you almost rewrite it for the same lack of reason, you walk away again, you accept that the thing is done, and then you spend the next day arguing internally about whether the thing is in fact done. The thud, in my experience, is usually about three days late and quieter than advertised.
The harder part is letting the thing go. By "letting it go" I do not mean publishing it. I mean stopping the small, persistent, almost-unconscious editing that I will keep doing in my head if I am not careful. The opening I would tighten. The line I would trade for a better one I have not found yet. The paragraph I would soften. None of those edits will happen on the page anymore. They happen, instead, in me, where they cannot improve the poem and can only erode the small, hard-won trust I built with myself by finishing it in the first place.
I am not a mentor. I do not have students. I sometimes, when I am being honest, would like to be the kind of writer who has students, because it sounds like a respectable thing to be at this point in a life. But I am not. The relationship I do have is with my own work and with the writers I read, and the only person I have ever been able to teach the thing I just learned is myself, and even that with mixed results. So this is not advice for anyone. It is a thing I am trying to remember.
Resilience's Gem
A piece of earth, shrouded in night, Bears silent weight with hidden might. Under pressure’s endless fight, A diamond forms, from coal to light.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →The thing I am trying to remember is that the poem I just finished does not belong to me anymore. Not really. It belongs, now, to whatever it is going to do without my supervision. Some of these poems will go on to surprise me. Some of them will quietly do nothing. A few of them will turn out, years from now, to have been doing more than I knew. None of those outcomes is mine to engineer. My job ended at the last word.
I am better at this than I used to be, but only because I have practiced being bad at it. The first few times I "finished" something I went on tinkering for weeks. The work suffered. I suffered. The act of finishing got contaminated by the act of being unable to leave the building. I have learned to leave the building.
So this is an entry about the small, unspectacular discipline of closing the file. Not slamming it. Not celebrating. Just closing it, and trusting that the version inside it is the version I meant. Some days that trust comes easily. Some days I have to put the laptop in another room. Both count.