Late tea and margins full of sentences

Rain has clasped the cobbles outside this borrowed Edinburgh flat; a mug of lapsang souchong steams between my hands and cedar incense writes a slow column into the air. Nina Simone is low enough that the radiator's tick sounds like punctuation, and the draft from the stairwell has my fingers thinking in semicolons.

A reader's note arrived today—"the ending felt too tidy"—and it keeps prodding at the draft on my lap. There's a peculiar eroticism to careful critique: slow correspondence before a meeting, someone who can tell me which paragraph bruised them and sit very still while I read it aloud. If you can point to the comma that kept you awake, you'll have my full attention.