soliloquy of a semicolon sofia aguilar
It is my lot in life to be constantly misunderstood. A misused, mistakenly implemented, frequently abused mark made of a period for a head and a comma for a leg, this body of misshapen proportions. Perhaps that is one reason for your confusion. I am made of punctuation that already exists, the in-between of the very components that shape my entity. The other, of course, is that you consider me standoffish, unapproachable, hard to read and even harder from which to invoke speech. Unlike quotation marks, I prefer to keep my private business unspoken. To my frequent dismay, however, idle chatter spreads even among punctuation. People are surprised to hear that I am incompatible with the colon and that parentheses are my lovers more than friends. But surprise is not the same as respect. From the moment of my invention, I have found myself incorrectly placed before incomplete clauses, dependent thoughts as though someone seeing a woman solely for her money (never mind her personality) or a child that is really an adult but has yet to move out of their par41
