I am a words girl, and as such, I know a lot of phrases.

But one phrase in particular I never quite understood: to make ends meet.

A common phrase, it’s clearly impossible to number how many times I’ve written, read, or heard that set of words in my lifetime. (Okay, I’ll try: if I’ve heard it on an average of one time per week at 52 weeks per year times 26 years (21 if we’re going only by cognitive years), it comes out to 1,092 times. 1,092 times I’ve heard the phrase, and that’s a scant estimate, since I’m sure I hear it more than once a week.)

And all that time—ALL THOSE HUNDREDS OF TIMES—I have read it this way:

To make ends’ meet.

• To make ends’ meet: meaning to make just enough money to survive.
• Ends’ meet: something a poor person can barely scrape together.
• With “make” being the verb and “ends’ meet” being the grouped-together noun, like Helm’s Deep. Ends’ Meet.
• With ends’ meet being something tangible a girl could potentially make with her bare hands or arrive at with hard work.
• Like this:

And therein lied my lifelong quandary: what was, in fact, an ends’ meet? Where did it come from? How was it made?

–Ends’ meet…what does it even mean?

The uncertainty nagged quietly away at me me for years until eventually, too lazy to look it up or exert any real effort to challenge my ignorance, I buried the confusion in the back of my mind and accepted the term for what it was: a literary mystery.

All the while I irresponsibly continued to use the phrase without fully understanding it.

Until last month.

Last month, when I was reading a book (this book) on our drive back from Utah, and there on the page sat the phrase: making ends’ meet.

Just sitting there in print. Mocking me almost. Only it wasn’t ENDS’ with an apostrophe; it was ENDS. Without an apostrophe.

I stared at it.

–It’s a typo. Silly editors.

I stared stronger.

–OR IS IT???

I felt dizzy as the twenty-six-year bundle of thoughts and experiences—the cumulative whole that makes up my very being—quickly dissolved into a soupy mess of misunderstanding.

What a difference an apostrophe can make.

How had I missed it? Or rather, how had I missed that it never belonged in the first place? What a fool I’d been.

It’s not making *ends’ meet*.

It’s making. ends. meet.

As in, taking two ends (of something…rope perhaps, or twine?), and making them meet. Finishing the circle. Completing the loop. Closing the gap.

Making the end of this month’s money meet the beginning of the next month’s money, with no gaps of starvation or poverty in between.

Even now, when I hear the phrase, I have to rework it in my head to dismiss my former understanding and replace it with my new one.

It feels very much like when I’m trying to translate French or Spanish and I’m forced to pick out every single word, think about it, and replace it with my native English counterpart.

I come to you in full and complete honesty when I bare these two painful confessions:

1. I have sketched the above images in an as-close-as-humanly-possible replication of what I always used to picture when I heard the phrase “Make ends meet,” and what I now understand it to mean, and

2. This is not a joke, not even a little bit.

I am shaken to my core.

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