They tell me I don’t use punctuation, that I don’t know how to use it, that I’m not capable.
But I remember very well when, in elementary school, teacher Stefania in that classroom with wooden and glass windows embracing the pines and mulberry trees on the hill in the middle of the city explained to me that, for example, the comma is used to give a pause that isn’t too long, like taking a breath; it marks time, it doesn’t stop it completely, it alternates it like the sand dunes you ride over on a bicycle, going up and then down and then up again as you head straight toward the sea.
Then there’s the semicolon. I’ve always really liked the semicolon: it’s more than a comma but a bit less than a period, that perfect middle ground, like a midday snack of bread and prosciutto not quite an ‘amatriciana’, but not just a cookie dipped in coffee either. It’s still, like good wine, yet it moves, like the dancer’s leg that gives a circle to her compass.
And then, if you’re good, you get to use the period now that is strong, sharp, decisive. There’s no turning back. It settles down, and you step off at the next stop after the ‘ding’; you drop down a line or two depending on how loudly that “we’ve arrived, miss” echoes.
So yes, I understood teacher Stefania; the theory seems clear to me. But well, if I decide to take a breath here, or here, that’s my business, isn’t it? I should be free to breathe a lot, a little, in bursts, or even to tell my whole story all in one go without ever breathing.
Yeah, but then the meaning changes, the intention shifts, people can’t understand what you meant. As if that intention were somehow separate from the relationship itself as if you had to explain to little girls how and whether to use a comma when the boys won’t let them play football because it’s a “boys’ game,” and explain to the boys how to use a period when the girls put an X in the “no” box in answer to “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” Or the other way around.
I find myself thinking that those periods, ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points are things you learn between one lesson and the next, or in the afternoons when, at the school gate, someone says “want to come study at my place?”, or on Saturdays and Sundays at the park, at the beach, in the snow, or in the courtyard below your house, or in a “come on up, dinner’s ready, I made meatballs — your favorite.” I mean, in relationships that are beautiful authentic caring clean good, rich — like meatballs, which everyone knows turn out tastier the more love you put into them.
Anyway, you know when people say “are you pretending or is that just who you are?” Well, I think punctuation ‘is’, it isn’t something you ‘do’.
I think the most beautiful things don’t have any punctuation at all.
Like making love, painting a picture, breathing in lavender, walking through the woods with the leaves that fall from up there to down here, and you feel they’re exactly where they need to be to let you brush against the clouds.
It’s impossible to make love with a period or a semicolon, to breathe lavender with a question mark, or to paint in parentheses.
And maybe we invented punctuation so we could understand, explain, regulate, restrain out of fear that otherwise we might get lost, might forget to breathe at the right moment, might fall off the bicycle while coming down the dune, might not get off at the correct stop, and end up so far away we could no longer see the edges.
I think punctuation is for those who have lost the music, because I once saw two pianists turn each other’s sheet music pages and play with their eyes closed, with such wonder, without speaking, without touching, without looking moving perfectly in unison.
The first breath gives no warning. It simply appears. A bit like the first “I’ll get off here” or the first “I love you”.
And if you look closely, I have used a few commas. But anyway the rest, you can put them in yourselves.
Susanna Lucatello
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