We Fought Over a Semicolon for a Week
The punctuation survived; our pride took casualties.
On the fourth day of the war, Dev sent me a photograph of a semicolon he had drawn on his palm in black marker, captioned “it lives here now.” I responded with a photo of my own palm, on which I had drawn a full stop the size of a coin. We were thirty-one years old. We were both, at the time, employed adults with tax obligations.
The line under dispute was the second-last line of a poem we had written together, the way we had written things together since college: him pacing, me typing, both of us convinced we were the reasonable one. The line read, “The rain stopped; nobody went to the window.” Dev's semicolon. I wanted, “The rain stopped. Nobody went to the window.” My full stop. That is it. That is the entire territory over which we fought for seven days, like two dogs and one very small bone.
You have to understand the stakes, which were enormous, which is to say there were none. We were entering the poem into a monthly poetry contest with a deadline of Sunday midnight. Neither of us needed to win.
Both of us needed to be right.
Day one was civil. We were at Chandan's cafe, our usual corner table, two coffees going cold between us in the manner of all serious literary negotiation. Dev made his case with his hands, the way he does, as if punctuation could be sculpted. “The semicolon holds the two halves together. The rain stopping and nobody noticing are one event. They belong in one breath.”
“They are two events,” I said. “The stop, and then the not-going. The full stop gives you the silence between them. The silence is the poem.”
“The silence is implied.”
“Implied silence,” I said, “is how marriages end.”
We left without settling it and without paying enough tip, and the barista, Kavya, who had watched us edit for three years, told us later she knew immediately something had gone wrong, because we usually left arguing about the bill instead.
Day two, he sent me an essay at 7 a.m. It was one of those craft pieces from an essay on why safe poems lose, and he had highlighted one line: cowardice hides in tidy punctuation. He added no message. Just the screenshot, like a man leaving a horse's head in a bed.
I replied with a photograph of a page of Emily Dickinson, who used dashes like confetti and would have found us both ridiculous, which in hindsight was the only accurate literary criticism produced all week.
Day three, the fight went public. Our college group chat, eleven people, most of whom had not read a poem since the syllabus required it, was invited to vote. The poll options, which Dev wrote, were “semicolon (correct)” and “full stop (a cry for help).” I objected to the framing. He objected to my objecting. Ankit voted for “remove the line entirely,” which we both agreed was an act of terrorism and united us for almost forty minutes.
Day four was the palm photographs.
Day five, we did not speak at all, and I sat with the poem open on my laptop, changing the mark back and forth, back and forth, semicolon, full stop, semicolon... like a man flicking a light switch in a house he is about to lose.
Because here is the thing I was not saying... and he was not saying... and the semicolon was absolutely saying.
Dev was leaving.
Berlin, a job he had earned twice over, a flight on the eleventh. This poem, the one with the rain and the window, was the last thing we would write at that corner table. We had written together every Sunday for nine years, through his divorce and my father's bypass and one memorably bad year when neither of us could produce anything except excuses. And rather than finish the last poem, we had decided... without ever deciding... to fight about a piece of punctuation until the deadline passed and the poem could stay unfinished forever, ours forever, safe from being over.
A full stop was exactly what neither of us could bear to type.
Kavya broke the siege. Day six, we arrived separately, sat at separate tables, two coffees at each, performing indifference so loudly the whole cafe could hear it. She walked over, put one saucer down between our tables like a referee placing a ball, and said, “Whatever it is, one of you should say sorry badly instead of correctly. You are both waiting to say it well.”
Say it badly instead of correctly. I have received advice from professors, editors, and one actual monk, and nothing has ever landed harder than a barista with a cleaning cloth over her shoulder.
So I walked to his table and said it badly. I said, “I don't care about the full stop. I care that after Sunday there is no Tuesday.” It made no grammatical sense. His face did something complicated, and he said, “I know. Why do you think I have been defending a semicolon like it owes me money.”
And then, because we are who we are, we laughed until Kavya had to ask us to keep it down, in the cafe where we had once been asked to keep down an argument about whether a poem can end on a preposition.
A semicolon is two complete thoughts that refuse to let go of each other. No wonder we fought for it. No wonder we kept it.
We kept it.
Of course we kept it. “The rain stopped; nobody went to the window.” He was right, and I have never once admitted it aloud until this sentence, which he will screenshot and send me within an hour of reading. Two complete clauses. Each one can stand alone. Neither one wants to. There is no better punctuation for the two of us, and I had spent a week trying to install a full stop in the middle of my own friendship.
We submitted the poem at 11:47 p.m. on Sunday, thirteen minutes before the deadline, from his flat, surrounded by cardboard boxes with BERLIN written on them in his terrible handwriting.
It did not win... It was not even shortlisted. We celebrated anyway, with warm cola, because the poem existing had turned out to be the entire prize.
He flew out on the eleventh. I did not go to the window when the plane would have passed; I have a policy against film scenes. Instead we started a new document that same night, shared, one poem, two cities. He writes his lines at midnight my time. I answer at breakfast his time. It is slow and ridiculous and completely unpunctual, a poem crossing a new beginning in both directions at once.
Sundays, we video call from our separate cafes. He orders two coffees and lets one go cold on principle. So do I.
The document is forty-one pages now. Not one full stop in it.
Semicolons everywhere.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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