Life as a Semicolon
The website of Project Semicolon reads, “A semicolon is used when an author could have chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to.” To me, this is kind of a metaphor for life. So often when we encounter difficult situations, it can appear easier to dismiss them or push them aside, but like when we write, we can choose to apply a semicolon to our lives and continue on. More on this in a minute.
Bets, Gregory, Miles and I – we four shared so many adventures together. Along the way, G introduced me to cryptic crossword puzzles. A cryptic puzzle is a crossword puzzle in which each clue contains another level of word puzzle. They are freaking hard, and especially at first, only felt possible when we worked on them together. We kind of had to sneak away to pursue this nerdy passion, stealing time from group activity, mechanical pencils in hand, avoiding the (semi) good natured eye rolling of our respective partners. Our favorite puzzles always contained this sentence in their instructions: “As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution.”
The last puzzle we did together was completed on the night he left us. Throughout that day, we texted back and forth madly with various clue revelations, and at one point he left me a message:
And just before 6 p.m., we finished.
So where does the repunctuation metaphor come in? I choose not to end the sentence that included G. I will apply the semicolon to try to make sense of life and continue on. I’ve solved my first puzzle alone in honor of G and our shared wacky hobby; it was extra freaking hard and took a long time. I like to think that when I filled the last squares, he sent me a cosmic “bravo” and a high five.
Ami
