Apostrophe (a-pos’-tro-phe): Turning one’s speech from one audience to another. Most often, apostrophe occurs when one addresses oneself to an abstraction, to an inanimate object, or to the absent.
“You’re not here. You’re never here. You are there. You are hither and yon. You are at the grocery store. You are working in the garden. You are selling Girl Scout cookies at the Mall. Where are you? You’re not here. You’re never here. you’re always somewhere else, doing something else. Maybe even being somebody else.
I speak to your absence—to the void you’ve created in my life.’
There, that’s what I would tell her if she was here. But she’s not here and I must look up and address the emptiness that encompasses me like a circus ring or a dead end in a middle-class housing tract with five-bedroom homes and giant lawns with built-in sprinklers.
What am I to think? When she comes home I am angry. I ruin the moment of reunion by asking her a series of paranoia-laced questions that culminate in “Who were you with?” She tells me she was with a variety of men. She tells me she was at a motel all day taking care of a line of men—probably 50. I can tell she’s being sarcastic. She tells me to calm down and we both laugh. But I’m faking it.
The next day, I follow her. She has the most boring day I can imagine. I wish I could clear my head of my paranoia. I’ve started drinking and that’s done some good. But, I’ve started having fantasies about killing her. I would never kill her, but I’m pretty sure I could beat her up. I have concluded that I’m mentally ill. I would turn myself in for treatment, but she would run wild while I’m put away.
God, what should I do?
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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