The Spaces Between

I don’t know why I like double spaces.  A long time ago, a typing teacher said it was the right way to type.  It felt right.  Words get one space, periods two.  I liked the way it looked.  My periods held space.

I like to breathe between sentences.  In a world hellbent on cramming everything together—apps, feeds, attention spans—I want my punctuation to put both legs out on the two empty seats next to it until the capital letter of the next sentence gives it the side eye.

The typography police will tell you it’s wrong now: obsolete.  A relic of the rocket age of monospaced fonts and mechanical limitations.  They’ll tell you my timeless double space was invented a hair more than a century ago—to compensate for typewriters that couldn’t kern properly.  And now that we have proportional fonts, the problem is solved.

The problem.  As if the human need for breathing room was a problem that needed solving.

Here’s what really happened: somewhere along the way, some efficiency-freak maniac decided that the extra space was waste.  We.  Cannot.  Tolerate.  Waste.  As if we’re running out of horizontal real estate.  As if the accumulated weight of whitespace would wrench our planet asunder.  As if saving that fraction of a second per sentence is going to pay us back for our stolen time.

It won’t.  That time is gone.  They took it and they’re not giving it back.  And they’ll be damned if they let you have a moment of visual silence between your thoughts too.

I hate wasting paper.  I print double-sided.  I use the backs of old envelopes for notes.  I have guilt about napkins.  But I will waste space in a digital document all day, every day, because that space isn’t waste.  It’s breathing room—you know?  The pause between movements; the silence that makes the music mean something.

The single-spacers have won, of course.  They always win.  The efficient always win as they efficiently grind us all down to optimized dust particles.  Hey you: no swirling around—it’s not efficient.  Every time I write something, some algorithm strips out my double spaces like it’s doing me a favor.  “You made a mistake.”  Like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I know exactly what I’m doing.

I’m refusing to let the bastards take everything.  They have my data.  They have my attention.  They have my dopamine responses trained to their notification sounds.  But they cannot have my double spaces.  Those are mine.  I put them there on purpose.  I will keep putting them there, and they will keep removing them, and this is the war we are fighting now.  Not for democracy or freedom or anything that means anything.  Just the mundane battle over the spaces between.

Two spaces after a period.  Fight me.

And if you ever—ever—come for my em dashes, you’d better bring a fucking army.