No point of punctuation can compete with the ellipsis.
There’s no mystery in a period, an exclamation mark, a question mark; they
always tell you the same thing. The period always means it’s over, finished,
there’s nothing else coming; you’ve reached the end. An exclamation mark isn’t
much better…the end has still come, but now you can be happy about it: Hurrah!
The End is here! Now what should I do? The question mark is intriguing…it’s no
longer certain what is going on, but even that question mark in and of itself
tells us something. It means there’s an answer waiting to be found, somewhere
hidden between all the other punctuation marks. Each punctuation mark tells us
one thing, and one thing only. It can never mean anything else.
But an
ellipsis; that’s unique. It is the greatest enigma of in punctuation
phenomena…no one can tell you what comes next. It’s the in-between stage, like
the silence before the storm or the morning dawn: night is over, but morning
hasn’t come yet. That’s what I like best about ellipses; the stillness. It’s
different from the stillness that comes after a period. There’s something
coming next.
My life is
like one giant ellipsis. A lot has happened in my past, and it’s very likely
that a lot will happen in my future; but on any given day, there is nothing
going on. It’s a constant struggle sometimes, because I want for my days to
have meaning. But the best days I have, the most meaningful, are always the
days that I spend my time doing nothing important…
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