There is a drawer in my desk that functions as an index to a book that does not exist: the complete works of the man I kept meaning to become. A grant application for a documentary about tobacco auctioneers. Three chapters of a novel set in a Buenos Aires I visited once and romanticized permanently. A diagram for a rain barrel system of genuine ingenuity and zero construction.

Borges wrote of a library containing every possible book, most of them gibberish, a few of them the truth. My drawer is the opposite: a library of books that were all, briefly, possible, and are now all, permanently, not. The index exists. The volumes never will. And yet the index is real — I can hold it, it takes up space, it must be dusted.

I have come to think this is what a life mostly is: not the things you did, which are few and mostly accidental, but the vast and carefully maintained catalogue of the things you fully intended to do and described to others in convincing detail. We are each the librarian of an unwritten collection. The tragedy is not that the books are unwritten. The tragedy is how good the index is.