End of a Millennium

If you've ever been a writer and taken it seriously, had a passion for it and felt like every work was, in it's purest essence, you; then you know how it feels to be edited. It can feel like a personal attack. If your work is changed drastically, or on a point you feel strongly about, you feel almost molested in a bizarre, compulsive sort of way. And if you are a writer, you know how it feels to care so deeply, but not believe in love at all; and I do care so deeply. I never knew how deeply until he edited me.

He had written for the paper for years before I got there. He had fans; he was good. I was trying. I realized how much work I still had to do, but I was proud of this latest piece. I asked him to read over it under the pretense of checking for grammar and spelling, but really because I wanted him to read me. I wanted to know, right away what he thought.

He read for several moments in silence and then, without looking up, pulled the pen from behind his ear. He had found a comma that should have been a semicolon, so he reached in and made one small dot atop my comma in the center of everything that was, in it's purest essence, me.

He left one tiny drop of black ink in my writing and he made it better. A single point that would have gone unnoticed by most, it was one thing he saw, one thing he thought, one thing he did that made me better. A bit of him buried deeply and blended perfectly within me.

The column ran the next day with our semicolon in it and no one who read it could have ever distinguished the part that was him from the part that was me. I thought it just as well.