The test results come back and something in you starts composing the ending before the doctor has finished the paragraph. The message goes unanswered for three days and you’ve already written the obituary for the friendship. The job disappears, or the marriage does, or the dream quietly stops showing up to work, and before you know it, you’ve moved from what happened to what it means, as if meaning arrives on the same schedule as the event itself.
We do this more often than we realize. We write sentences before life has finished writing them. Not because we’re impatient, but because an ending, even a bad one, feels safer than an open question. A period gives you something to stand on. It tells you where you are in the story, even if where you are is nowhere good. Uncertainty doesn’t offer that kind of floor. So we build our own, usually out of the worst available material, and call it closure before it’s earned the name.
There’s an old story about a man who had every reason to close his sentence early. His own brothers sold him into slavery as a teenager, and what followed was years of being underestimated, falsely accused, and forgotten by people who owed him better. By any fair accounting, his story had a clean and understandable place to end. When he finally stood face to face with the brothers who did it to him, years later and with every kind of power now on his side, he didn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. He didn’t call it a misunderstanding or soften it into something more forgivable than it was. He named it plainly. You meant this for harm.
But he didn’t stop there, and that’s the part worth sitting with. He wasn’t rewriting the sentence. He wasn’t denying what belonged in it. He was simply refusing to let their intention be the one that finished it. The harm was real. The ending wasn’t theirs to write.
He didn’t pretend the wound wasn’t real. He simply refused to believe it had earned the right to write the final sentence. Those aren’t the same thing.
Most of us are living somewhere in that unfinished sentence right now, further along than the worst part but nowhere near a conclusion, uncertain whether what happened to us gets the final say. It rarely feels like resolution while you’re inside it. It feels like waiting, like being suspended between what was and what hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe that’s why we rush toward periods. They feel more certain than commas. But certainty and truth aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the most honest punctuation isn’t the one that closes the sentence. It’s the one that admits we don’t know enough yet to finish it.
Leave a Reply