There is a particular quality to the weeks before a premiere. The work exists but is not yet public. It lives only in the bodies of the people who made it — in muscle memory and recurring doubt and the strange intimacy of the rehearsal room. Outside, the city continues. You move through it differently.

I have been thinking about what it means to hold something that is finished but not yet witnessed. The difference between completion and release. A score that has never been played is still a score. A photograph that has never been seen is still a photograph. But there is something that only happens in the moment of encounter — when the work leaves the room it was made in and enters the room of a stranger.

I don't know what to do with the time between. I walk. I drink coffee standing up. I notice things I usually don't — the specific way light moves across the harbour in early morning, the sound the tram makes when it turns.