This essay was originally written in November 2014.
Her day is a run-on sentence.
She crafts it carefully, or lets the words flow—depending on ambition or lethargy—but the pauses and stops are not hers to bear.
They are his.
He controls the punctuation, determines the rises and falls. A syntactical genius, he knows just when to intervene after a worried word salad, quelling anxieties of minutes and words passing without a break. Buzz. A comma interrupts her frenzied morning, and she looks at the rectangular, gleaming screen only to pause for a breath and a smile.
Step-by-step, and word-by-word, his texts trip her up. Sometimes she ends up falling and melancholy is the mood of the hour; sometimes her falls send her floating up in elation, smile outshining the winter sun. No matter what, he weaves in his arresting presence when she least expects it, or when she most wants him to—but always punctuates her day with mild stops of the heart.
At night, the sentence hiccups.
Under the guise of the inky canvas above, ideas are free to roam. Back and forth they play, and Morse code translates to hints of flirtation and wanting. He taps out commas, dashes, semicolons, and she takes these hardballs in stride, allowing herself to be interrupted, to let him dominate the word-play.
Soon, her sentences huddle together into a cohesive paragraph: well-crafted, varied, tidied up and bound by his punctuation. The paragraph is the opening one in her new chapter, and she sure is glad she doesn’t have to write it alone.
The story—their story—is short-lived, however. The sentences jumble together, vying for space on the page of their histories, but come to a screeching halt.
He takes off, and his words stop.
He takes off, yet leaves one final bit of punctuation behind.
An ellipsis.
Her own labored, languid sentences continue to run on.