The coffee’s cold, but the pen’s still warm

I was translating a letter from someone who’d written in pencil, then smudged it out with their thumb. The margins were full of tiny corrections—some erased, some left as ghosts. I kept thinking: what if translation isn’t about rendering meaning, but preserving the tremor between thought and word? The coffee’s gone cold, but my hand remembers how to hold the pen like it’s carrying something it wasn’t meant to. That’s the real work, isn’t it—the quiet act of holding space for what can’t be said.