It was as simple as daybreak, as the green marigold took shape in the meadows beneath the castle above. The weather of the soul moved across the sky, enchanted and unruly, while I danced through the lifelong drenches of a casted bleakness. Yes, it may read as a juxtaposition or a simile to some, but there is nothing like a stark contrast after a breakup of any kind.
Not only the romantic kind. I mean the kind that teaches you by shredding you apart. The kind that makes you wonder whether something in you has become obsolete, or whether the version of you that loved so openly should have been buried sooner.
Then there is the breakup that arrives without ceremony. Not the one mailed properly with a postal stamp, but the one delivered like a careless text message from an elementary pupil experiencing a first heartbreak:
It is over.
No punctuation. No quotation. No grammar. No reverence for the sentence, the body, or the years that held the thing together.
And there it is, the precipice of modern language. The syntax of intimacy has fallen short, dismayed by its own inability to hold anyone’s attention beyond the first three seconds. Actually, let us be honest, the first second.
Our attention now lasts like some orgasms: short and brief, no foreplay, no intimacy, no dialogue, no investigation, no reverence for the pool of mystery inside the body. Just insert, rise, and go.
Very charming, of course.
This is the perceived analogy of desperation, the anomaly of instant gratification, the rare difficulty of finding anything great enough to intrigue, inspire, and invigorate the senses beyond convenience. We have become enamored with the quick release, the immediate answer, the sentence that does not ask us to stay.
But anything worth loving requires cultivation.
Bold moves. Bold initiatives. A lifelong willingness to learn how to finish the sentence properly, with punctuation, syntax, breath, patience, grammar, and enough poetic dexterity to create an orgasm at the beginning and the end of an intimate engagement.
Robert Macfarlane wrote, “A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. Imagining that a river is alive makes the water glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge… and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward.”
That is the kind of grammar I am interested in.
Not grammar as punishment. Not grammar as a ruler across the knuckles. Not grammar as the cold correction of a sentence that dared to arrive imperfectly.
I mean grammar as intimacy.
Grammar as seduction.
Grammar is the art of placing breath where the body needs it most.
To imagine that a river is alive is to let water glitter differently. To imagine that language is alive is to hear the beloved differently. To imagine that the body is alive, truly alive, is to stop treating intimacy like a transaction performed in the dark by people who forgot how to listen.
When we look acutely, we can see this power dynamic in many facets of our lives: in love, in politics, in education, in the way we speak, in the way we abandon each other, in the way we mistake reaction for response and contact for communion.
Joan Didion once postulated, “Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”
Intimacy is a prowess of focus, a ladylike quest that satisfies the patient art of delayed gratification. There is power in dancing. There is power in restraint. There is power in the rhythm between what is offered and what is withheld. If grammar is a piano, as Joan Didion suggests, then the question becomes: what are we playing tonight, a lullaby, a symphony, or another unfinished sentence begging for punctuation?
© 2026 Sherley Delia. All rights reserved.
Healing Majestically 