The mind does not hold finished things. It holds open loops open. That is the whole mechanism, and the whole cost is in the word open.
A thing without an ending is not stored. It is carried into the next task, the next conversation, the next night. It does not wait politely. It stands in the mind until it is ended.
A thing that decayed could be mourned and released. A thing that persists must be looked at, or not looked at, every day. The looking and the not-looking are both a tax, paid in attention, and attention is the one currency that does not come back.
The unfinished do not decay. They accumulate. Every half-read book, every draft without an ending, every project waiting for the right season joins the pile. So does every case left open at the end of a shift, every repair put off to a better month, every argument stopped mid-sentence. The pile is a ledger read every day, whether anyone turns to it or not. It does not read the contents of its rows. It reads whether they are open. The charge is the same for a bridge and a letter. A debt does not stop charging interest because the debtor stopped opening the mail.
The default story about the pile is that it is potential. A future self will get to all of it. The pile will become the work. But potential is a story the pile tells to keep itself alive. The pile is a creditor. The interest is paid in a quiet guilt that stops being noticed because it is always there, and a cost that stops being noticed is still being paid.
The more a beginning matters to someone, the more they demand of its ending. The requirement grows with every draft. The escape hatch has to be perfect too, so no one escapes through it. The pile grows either way.
There are two exits from the hall. The first is to close the thing at 80 percent and let the world finish it. The second is to take it down on purpose. Demolition is a form of completion. A thing ended deliberately receives its ending, and an ending is what releases the account.
The expensive state is the third one. The shelf. The thing that is neither shipped nor buried. The mind offers many reasons to stay there: more preparation, better timing, a version worthy of the pile's promise. All of them are the interest being charged.
An ending does not need to be great. It needs to be.
In the hall, one column stands in the light. It was not the largest column. It is the one that received its ending. The rest of the pile is still dark.