Ellipsis

I love words, which I guess is a good thing since I'm an English-Writing major. The thing about words is they inspire. Whether spoken or written, words create chaos and they solve it. They can spark change or they can stifle it. Words can be blunt and plain or throbbing with hidden meaning, and that amazes me. Call it nerdy or over the top, but it's factual. Words matter. I guess that's why I catch phrases said by professors, mentors, preachers, or people in general and hold tightly to them as if at any moment they could leap from my memory and take the possibility of inspiration with them. It's that small fear that caused me to catch something my playwriting professor said today, something that I'll never let go of.

She was teaching us about playwriting, which I'm sure you could have guessed by now. More specifically, she was talking about the importance of the ending. Before she began her talk about endings, she made us do an exercise where we wrote six lines of dialogue. As you can imagine, it is really hard to portray meaning and purpose in a two-person dialogue where each character only speaks three times! When we were all finished with our six-lines, a girl was chosen to read hers aloud. Her dialogue was going well, but she expressed to us that she had no idea how to end it, so in a completely random and last minute decision, she had one of her characters shoot the other. Of course we laughed because it was so unfitting, but it caused our professor to begin to talk about endings. She told us that, contrary to popular belief, the ending doesn't have to be final. Then she said, "Sometimes the end is more like an ellipsis."

I had one of those moments that I talked about earlier. I sat still for a moment before grasping at my pen and frantically putting what was spoken on the white page in front of me. Guys, this happens pretty regularly, and I have to admit it's probably one of the main reasons I pay attention in class. I stared at the words strewn across my paper in blue ink, and thoughts were flying through my mind.

The ending doesn't have to be final, and often it isn't. It's a dot-dot-dot, those three little periods at the end of a sentence that let people know there is more. And things don't just work like this in writing. It works like this in real life. When one chapter of your life ends or you have to say goodbye to people you never wanted to say goodbye to, it isn't always final. Graduating high school seemed so surreal and final when I was sitting on the field in my cap and gown. However, now that I'm in my first year of college, I know that graduation wasn't a period; it was an ellipsis.

I Googled the word just to see what sorts of definitions would come up. One definition stated that ellipses often indicate an "unfinished thought." When I read that, I had to smile to myself. Lately, I've been in a time of transition in multiple aspects of my life. It seems like the entirety of who I am is making a shift, and sometimes that can feel a lot like ending. The finality of that feeling has caused me to feel so heavy and broken, but after hearing those words from my professor today, I had a slight deviation of thought. You probably know just as well as I do that the slightest of shifts can make a huge difference. My life right now is like an unfinished thought. While I am transitioning through stages, I am not ending. My life, your life...it's an ellipsis--a beautiful continuation of the life God has destined us to live.