i thought of you like punctuation. as a period, you stopped
me in my tracks with every word that left your mouth. you
acted as a comma, connecting two parts of a whole together
like the way our lips seal to one another as if we are trying to
become one. the linking of our hands is a semi-colon, because
then we are two clauses. able to stand on our own two feet but
refusing to because we have each other. your fingers interlacing
with mine as we lean on each other like a forward and a back slash,
because even on paper, we are a pair. in bed, we fit each other like
quotation marks, marking the beginning and the end of unspoken
sentences that hang in the air between us. when you were angry,
your whole body would be straight as an exclamation mark. pulling
yourself tall and taut to tell me you were emotional and wanted some
space, so i would tab myself away and give you the room of an indent
for your paragraph. your mouth would be a hyphen, nothing like
the purse of an asterisk when you leaned in to kiss me. but eventually,
we’d shift and come back together again as two curved brackets, like moon
crescents joining to make a whole. to me, you are every grammatical rule there is:
everything that makes me coherent.
Jessica Tsang is a seventeen-year-old based in Hong Kong. At the age of five, she found that drawing stories was better than simply drawing, then found that writing stories was better than drawing them. When she is not writing or contemplating the meaning of life, you can find her studying, playing music, or drowning herself in copious amounts of green tea.