Morning Split in Two by a Giant Semicolon

It settled on the street corner like a concrete breath, leaving passersby suspended between two halves of a sentence.
Yes, this article is overdoing it — and that is precisely the news: reality is asking for a pause.

At 7:12 a.m., a semicolon a good two meters tall appeared at the crossroads of the obvious. Conversations began to limp, slices of toast hesitated between butter and jam, and yours truly wondered whether to keep feigning sobriety. We are describing a punctuation mark the way one would describe an inner snowfall: with gloves, and the feeling of walking on silence.

“You could literally sit in the pause,” testifies Édith Bégonia, bookbinder and collector of silences, pointing to a chair no one can see. “I saw it blink; it stretched my coffee by two and a half minutes.” Let us note that this quotation is as unverifiable as it is comfortable, which, in the context of our investigation, constitutes luxury-grade proof.

At this stage, this front page prefers candor: it is not sure it exists except in relation to this semicolon. When we tried to measure the object, the ruler turned into a paragraph (this one, perhaps). We wrestle with the absurd using words that, as soon as they line up, ask for a chair, too.

By the time you read this, the mark may well have moved into this line spacing; it is what holds the day by the waist to keep it from falling too quickly from morning to night. Should it happen to give the world back its breath, we will publish the follow-up — after a brief, very brief, yet nonetheless necessary, suspension.