Handed in my final PhD work at 3 a.m. this morning. The send button clicked, the file vanished into the university’s portal, and I sat there staring at the screen as though something enormous just ended, or maybe just begun. It reminded me of finishing a record: months, sometimes years of writing songs, rehearsing, arranging, revising, chasing down the right takes, then one day you hand it to the mastering engineer or the label. Suddenly, the music is no longer in your hands. It belongs to someone else, to a process you can’t control.

A novel feels the same. You’ve lived inside its sentences so long that they’ve started to echo in your thoughts when you’re cooking dinner or walking across a parking lot. Then one day you hit “submit” and the novel leaves you. It becomes a document in another person’s inbox, a bundle of files awaiting judgment. The room feels too quiet afterwards, the way the studio does after the last track is mixed and you realize the band has packed up, the microphones are back in their cases, and the mess of creation is over.

Both moments are bewildering because you expect some kind of fanfare, some obvious sign that you’ve crossed a finish line. Instead, it’s just silence. No confetti. Only the hum of the refrigerator and the question rising: What happens next?