If a paragraph is thought, a complete thought, then a sentence is one piece of a thought. Like in addition where one number plus another number equals a bigger number. If you wrote down subtraction you would start with a thought and take enough away that it was no longer complete. You might write backward, or nothing at all, or less than nothing. You wouldn’t even think or breathe. A comma, that is a place where you breathe, or think, which is how breathing and thinking are the same. They collect, or are places to collect. A semicolon is a strange kind of thinking that I don’t understand. It is more than one sentence inside one sentence. It makes more sense to me just to let each sentence be a sentence. Father says both pieces on either side of a colon should add up to the same thing, even if one side is just a list. Some of the things I need to write about: Randy, the look-outs, bodies, names, Nameless, people when they think they’re alone, snow, trampolines, helicopters.
- My Abandonment by Peter Rock