He always ended it like that. It didn't matter how much he felt for her, he would never go so far as a simple 'o' which represented two bodies hugging or a crass emoticon. And never, never, with a spiky line based 'x' which conveyed a soft sweet kiss. It repulsed him to think such bodily functions could be typesetted. He thought it crude, basic, very unworthy of their real counterparts.
The full stop was his way.
Restrained. Polite. Final. It represented more than just mere punctuation to
him. It meant 'the buck stops here'. It meant that further interpretation was
not his responsibility. He liked the finality. He saw safety in the slight
mark left at the bottom of the line, it stabilised his universe; so he adhered
to it and cradled it with fervour. He ended it with every correspondence he
wrote.
The claustrophobic point of
the full stop was sharp, tiny, but very real. When he put it after his name in
his mail, he knew it made a statement. I am 'He'. Its effect would bind the
reality of what he is into mere letters of his name, restricting the
possibility of further expansion, possibilities or interaction.
She, the observer to his
utterances, was given no allowance of emotion expressed through the common symbols
of society. She stared at the point and felt her spirit sink at the definite
nature of the spot.
Later on that day, she
would wonder at all the times he had held her in his arms, when he had softly
touched and kissed her and thought about where the full stop lay amongst these
memories. It seemed like a sudden departure, as if his words and physical
response to her were a mere contradiction, a laughable pretence, to the reality
of his punctuation. She remembered when he gathered her into him and tried to
dissolve her body into his, when there was no understanding of when she started
and he stopped.
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