I was watching 13 Reasons Why (again) and realized, If I had to get a tattoo today (maybe I wouldn’t get it or maybe I would, but if I had to) I’d get a comma.
The semi-colon has received its due, sure, but what about the comma? Not enough has been said about it. What if an impending full-stop was not your issue, what about getting through every day?
I hate talking in metaphors as well.
Comma, we’re taught, is a pause in the sentence. It’s often a necessity. At other times it’s yet another device to structure your writing, your sentence, to convey your tone.
And they’re mostly harmless.
I like trees, flowers and life.
I like trees, flowers, and life.
I wanted a pause after flowers– maybe that gave it a rhythm in my head, maybe I was pensive or maybe I’m just obsessed with adding unnecessary punctuation that infuriates the shit out of readers.
But the beauty of the comma lies in all it stands for. Comma is hope, just like semi-colon is (the better) alternative to a full-stop. It’s an appeal to pause and to look around, to not get lost in details when they overwhelm, to wait and remember all that makes life beautiful.
Because there’s always details, all day everyday. And when they appear larger than life, remember to ,
For instance, this whole year I’ve wondered how in the big picture I’ve spent my 25th year on earth without eating good meencurry while staying away from people I love. I ask myself everyday, is anything worth that? For now all I have are questions. Also I think that was a bad example.
My brother and I talked about (terribly) longer sentences the other day – how they often creep up in my writing, how he thinks the work is badly edited when he comes across one in a news article/report, to which we discussed and decided (or I did :P) that it’s cool if it isn’t formal writing, and it’s cool if the statement is still coherent.
I have stretched out so many sentences into whole paragraphs made possible only by the comma – and maybe a hyphen. 😀
And while it might sound so much like an inferior sibling to the semi-colon, in a lot of cases, comma suffices. It gets you through. It’s for daily use.
And it does its job pretty damn well too, no?
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