Sitting at the corner of my mind is a sprawling metropolis of abandoned ideas and incomplete drafts, all of them feverishly conceived. Some are penned in haste and barely legible, others the result of fingers tap dancing on screen. An ambitious essay on Nabokov’s Lolita flies in unruly proximity to a listicle on problematic fictional crushes—ill-fated jets bound to clash. There is an imposing tower of reviews about all that I’ve watched, read, and listened to, at the base of which sits a bustling mailroom packed to the rafters with eager letters to be, addressed to everyone from Donna Tartt to my 15-year-old self. Threatening to trample everything in its path is a formless monstrosity that feeds on undeveloped opinion pieces, like the one about how disaster porn disguised as Hollywood blockbusters capitalise on our oxymoronic fear of and inability to look away from scenes of urban decimation in the age of terrorism, or its sister piece, on the contextual relevance of each Godzilla film (the latest featured a nuclear disaster, tsunami, and earthquake). These are only some of the rowdy inhabitants cramped into the isle of chaos and calamity that functions as my control centre, if you can call it that. Like life, each unwritten piece breathes potential, but it is this ‘could be’ and its flip side, the ‘what if it won’t be’, that has my hands hovering above the keyboard, unable to start or shake the possibility of failure, always imminent on my anxious mind. Kids, it took real guts for a chronic procrastinator (hello, parasitic perfectionism!) like me to even embark on a post this brief, so *cue virtual applause*. This post is about unfinished pieces, so I guess it’d be clever to