Revering the Puzzle Piece, Not the Puzzle
Nobody spares too much thought towards the cardboard, but if you think about it long enough, cardboard harbors in its tiny fibers clinging together something left to be desired. Sure, the exterior is smooth, brown, and it usually bears its own form of tattoos in the style of shipping labels or barcodes. Its interior is important because it carries something, but when the product is excavated from the cave of cardboard, the box is discarded. The cardboard’s misery doesn’t end there- as it is then left in an alleyway only to be bathed in bitter torrents of stinging, blinding rain. Boxes are only helpful to the everyday person when they move to a new house on a new street, with a new job and all of that new beginning narrative-ness that we often see in movies before the haunted house of yesteryear wreaks its havoc.
The only other time I can think of cardboard being loved is when old people and families do puzzles. Puzzles are fragments of cardboard, except they aren’t rain soaked, and they bear a plastic reproduction of a cute design or photo, perhaps even a landscape. I used to fray the edges of the corner pieces and strip the image away. Not really, but sometimes my hatred for them tempts me to do just that, but in all honesty, that’s quite a wasteful action and the point it makes isn’t worth it.
However, I do remember walking into the living room, seeing my family form small piles of these reviled fragments. The half-completed image of God-who-cares, Italy laid on the green felt, the combined pieces stark against the jagged gap of what was still left to be. My brother put his pile in the flimsy box. My mom was rolling up the felt that held all the pieces together.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked.
“I think we’re done with this puzzle.”
“Too hard,” my sister chimed in.
“Finally!” I exclaimed.
It took two Christmases for my family to realize that twenty-five thousand, microscopic, grainy fragments required too much patience for an image we could find on Google, and it hit them like an epiphany or come-to-Jesus moment. I sighed with relief when I wasn’t implored to help them piece more of it together and was even more ecstatic when they dumped the half-completed portion away into the storage closet. My mom said we might finish it on a rainy day, and we didn’t want to lose any progress. But there have been monsoon season’s worth of rain and snow, and it has never left that storage room.
Despite this deep-rooted dislike for puzzles, I maintain that I am a puzzle piece. I’m not saying I carry an unhealthy amount of self-loathing, I just never want to be a part of a whole picture. I am not a vineyard in Tuscany, I am not a horse galloping across blades of grass that cling onto the Sun – I am an asymmetrical face with an even more asymmetrical soul. Proportions and clicking into place, “aha” moments – those were never in the cards for me. Therefore, the puzzle itself, the inevitable whole picture and completion of something, is what I cannot connect with.
I found this out when I woke up one morning and saw the horizon that met my eyes was no longer as blank as I had liked it to be. Instead of seeing electric lines grazed by swarms of prairie grass and clusters of pines whose needles reminded me of fine-toothed combs, I saw the dreaded postcard stamp of suburbia. Houses with their forgettable mailboxes, sidewalks that had the hue of untouched paint. Trees were placed in more methodical places – some too close together that they withered in less than a year. I loved my solitary house until the moment I saw its exact replica four or five doors down because it was no longer a piece, but rather part of the pieces.
This proliferation of houses didn’t happen overnight, but it’s been so long that it now feels like it. The idea of something in its entirety, in its completion, is truly what we equate to the ever-elusive happiness. This notion of fulfillment through finality is marketable though- I’ll give it that.
Take for example, the idea that people are destined to find their other halves, as we hear this with the concept of soulmates and life partners. We hate cliffhangers, suspense, and all of that because there’s a bunch of pieces suspended in the air that don’t fall into the green felts of our minds. We call technicians to fix the faulty, frayed wiring that causes the weird flicker, and when we see them do that little trick that renders the world whole again, it’s a piece falling into the right place at the right time. Mystery solved, conclusion reached, ending complete – what a stagnant approach. Satisfying for a moment, for a year, and maybe it’s my youth that renders me restless and unsatisfied when the period hits the page, or Le Fin reads on an all-black, all-encompassing movie screen in an already abysmal room. There has to be more, things as they are will never be enough unless they are dynamic and growing. We hear similar words on vastly different subjects in our churches. In hot, unconditioned air, as the priest says the Glory Be.
Speaking of hot weather, I remember the summer I wrote my first novel. Wrote – does that suggest the text itself is complete? If that’s the case, then I did not write it at all because even though it sits at a nice 55,000 words and is around 170 pages or more, it is like the half-completed puzzle that my family gave up on. The sentences, like the cardboard in an alleyway, collect dust in their separate corners of the pages. People always tell me I should finish it. I had a former coworker of mine suggest that I publish it unfinished. I let the topic fade away from consciousness, but she always brought it up every now and then.
I’m even having a hard time finishing this piece, as I skip over from the place of keys, white screens, and Times New Roman. I’m writing two sentences in teal ink on yellow paper in a journal with birds on the cover. Then, you go back a couple of pages and see the draft in a stark, alarming red. I can never keep the same story in the same place – it has to migrate, move, and breathe. I bet the trees in my neighborhood desired the same before a bunch of them were planted, and the oxygen battle began.
Oxygen. That’s an intriguing concept because in tight places, it’s hard to breathe. When you go to crowded rooms with bodies pressed so close together, there is still enough oxygen for the taking, but it’s so much more laborious. The experience makes you appreciate ajar windows more. I was in a nightclub a while ago. It was a church at one point, but the colorful lights and the moths they attracted were holy in a different way. There were no Sunday clothes on, or if there were, it was always the people with a plethora of piercings and vibrant hair that wore them.
There were three levels, with live performances dazzling the main floor and the stage, but upstairs was doused in a low red-purple, and then the basement was ironically the brightest of all with a golden light hitting 50s-esque checkered floors. I was making my way to see the impromptu displays set up for up-and-coming artists, including my good friend who is a photographer. We were eighteen at the time, the black X’s marked on the top of our hands, the permanent marker wriggling off as the tip of the marker met the bony parts. I saw the fairy lights and cactus lights from her room make a shrine of her prints. They were landscapes of the mountains, of her travels to the West, and some of her close friends. I can’t remember if her pieces from Moab were included in the mix, but considering how much she talks about the place, I would imagine they were there. What wasn’t there: pictures she took of the Alaskan Malamute from three months earlier when we were running around on a frozen lake. When the Sun hit the slush surface and made jewels of the snow. Sky was so blue, the skin underneath our eyes purple from staying up numerous nights in a row. There were probably others around her who felt the same way, thinking of their own memories that she captured but did not share. I smiled, not only admiring how far she'd come, but also at the fact that what I was seeing wasn’t the entire picture. If she did another showcase or gallery exhibition in the future, the amount of landscapes and photos she hid from the universe would probably multiply even though there were more of her pieces on display.
There were obviously some artists who were multi-medium in their works, as one designed denim jackets while simultaneously having her chapbooks nestled to the right. Photographs littered between pages, concentration on the words were difficult considering the people shuffling in an unbound line behind me. Music, laughter, tufts of weed smoke curling in between the gaps of the people who were teeth in the mouth of this place- all distracting, yet enthralling. I wanted to do this someday myself, part of the light but not in the limelight. Part of the joy, but not the reason for it necessarily. Sounds bad, but it’s true as I write it now. The multi medium artists, you could tell, were just happy to have people look at their work. Buying it, of course, a bonus, but anytime I inquired or conversed I felt as if I were part of a conversation. Not the grand discourse, not the conversation, but one that was happening alongside many. Clusters of puzzle pieces, but no grand portrait.
It was weird that it took moments like waking up in my neighborhood and going to an art exhibition at a nightclub to realize my philosophy on life and a lot of things. Thinking back to that night now, it was almost as if an architect somewhere in this universe took three floors from different realities and glued them together hastily hoping that the building would not collapse. I wondered in all of this where God was – and thinking back now, I bet He was wondering what had become of His church and how there were multitudes of sinners and churchgoers relishing in the freedom the atmosphere offered. He obviously looked on that night at the same time that he watched churches on the other side of the world legitimately carry on with their services, their masses, and hymns. Two different visions, so displaced yet simultaneous. Whether the artists who came to this exhibition bore their entirety in the ethereal environment or they put bits and pieces up in weird ways, whether the churchgoer brought their Bible or their rosary beads, it did not matter. They were all pieces, and most were not in the final, puzzle-perfect format. Far from Italy, far from the idealized Tuscany, far from the stables, and farthest from the world that values Amazon boxes until the moment they’re cut.
I hope I get to do something like that art show in my lifetime, although I don't know where to start. Maybe my former coworker was partially right: the novel I wrote will be seen by some people in its fragmented format. I’ll be on the floor with the blue lighting, and they’ll have a hard time making out my words. They’ll have all the pieces, all 55,000 words, but they won’t have a final idea of how it should end. If it should end at all.