You punctuated my life.

There are apostrophes and quotation marks

hugging most of the past years

of our lives.

Colons begin the lists

of growth, of faltering,

of time standing still,

and the occasional stages

where we stepped backwards.

There are question marks

still unanswered;

and ellipses

of words unspoken.

Exclamation points mark

good times and sometimes

scream of painful breaks.

There are moments

when I tuck my memories

comma-like, to my heart;

other times I hide them

between dashes, attempting to

separate them from

present tense.

I have yet to figure out how to

diagram this sentence we have lived.

I struggle with the final period

you placed so blithely

at our story’s end.

It contracted what I thought

was to be lifetime, into

an era braced in parentheses.

I await the capitalization that begins

my next story.