There’s this shelf in your house. Whoever owned the house before you hammered in this shelf at precisely your eye-level in the back of a storage closet catty corner to the staircase. Convenient.
The shelf, it’s almost hidden because you always leave the closet door half-open, but whenever you pass by – on your way out, on your way in, back and forth because you’ve forgotten what you were looking for and where you’d put it – despite the small amount of real estate it occupies in reality, all you see is this shelf.
That’s because on this shelf, there is a puzzle you cannot solve.
You’re not quite sure when the puzzle appeared there. Well, that’s not quite true. There is this day you remember from months and months ago, but the specificities of how the puzzle arrived on your particular shelf remain hidden behind a hazy fog, the kind of fog that makes you nervous about running off the road and careening into a mountain valley.
But that’s not the important part. The important part isn’t where or when the puzzle appeared. No, the important part is that despite your most valiant efforts, you can’t shake out the right solution, the right configuration. Infuriatingly, this riddle refuses to be unriddled.
This is incredibly frustrating for you because you, you are the queen of puzzles. You have a system, a method, tried and true, a knack for organization and an alacrity for creating order out of chaos. There isn’t a puzzle you haven’t solved… that is, until this irritating puzzle turned up on your shelf.
It doesn’t help there isn’t a picture on the box which means you have no idea what you are working towards. When you look at the jumble of pieces, the possibilities appear endless, making you dizzy with overwhelm. You know you’d be better off shooting blanks in the dark, but you, you never stand down to a challenge. No, you, you stick your tongue between your teeth, knit your brows, try, try, try again.
And after a while, piece by piece, day by day, you do end up somewhere. Problem is, every time you sit down to work the knot, the place you’re heading towards looks very, very different. Some days, you see a shark, a very kind shark. Some days, it’s a void, a very dark void. Some days, it’s the love of your life, but then other days, it’s a kitchen floor littered with the irregular shards of a glass plate shattered across it.
At first, this wrinkle does little to deter you. You press on. You attack with aplomb. Onwards, onwards, onwards. You are nothing if not persistent. But then somewhere, perhaps around the two-hundred-and-fiftieth day, you start to lose hope. Not in the puzzle, but in yourself.
You see, in the background, you’ve done the math and you’ve realized how unlikely it is that you can solve this puzzle when you have no idea where the end is. And worse, you have started to suspect you don’t even have all the pieces, that whoever was responsible for this puzzle kept some of the pieces for themselves, that they handed you a lie, a trap. Suddenly, it feels like it is not you playing a game, but that someone is playing a game on you.
Well. That takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?
So, you throw all the pieces back in the box, shove it back in the closet, vow to yourself that you will not return to a game that is rigged. But you, you’re addicted to the satisfaction that comes from solving a problem no one else can, so even though you’re very good and you don’t open that box, you keep that closet door half-open.
But now, every time you pass that shelf, you are filled with a great sadness, a grief. That failure, it takes the wind out of your sails, rounds in your shoulders so that it becomes harder and harder to breathe. Though you know it would be easier on you, you cannot close the door. You need the daily reminder that in life, there are sometimes puzzles that cannot be solved.
What a shame.
The strange thing though is, the more time you spend away from the puzzle, the more you remember all the other wonderful things in your life, all those puzzles you have solved. And one evening, instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you dig out some of your greatest hits from under your bed, light a few candles, play some music, revel in the oozy pleasure of running your tongue over achievements you have well-earned.
And as the days pass, you find that when you pass that storage closet, your eyes are no longer drawn to the shelf, to that mysterious puzzle. Instead, you fill your time with other puzzles and games, ones you’ve checked aren’t rigged before investing. And then, one day, you pass that storage closet without registering that shelf or that puzzle. In fact, it’s only after you’ve reached your destination that you remember there even is a storage closet and a shelf and an unsolved puzzle in your life. The smile that crosses your face in that moment, it’s ten times bigger than it has ever been before.
And now, you pass that storage closet without a second thought, too busy humming and twisting your hips to a song that rings in your ears. That puzzle, it’s a memory so distant that you don’t quite believe it happened to you at all.
But then, after another fifty days, when you’re heading to the kitchen to rustle up something to eat, the puzzle strikes you, catching your eye once again. Oh, what a lovely surprise – not that the puzzle is still there, but that you’d actually forgotten it. You chuckle to yourself. How could this game have occupied so much of your life for so long? It seems so small now.
And so, even though a heartbeat of trepidation still haunts you, you walk over to the closet and pull out the box with an image of passing your hands over it one last time before triumphantly shutting the door.
But when you pull out the box, you nearly drop it. You see, somewhere in those fifty days, when you were busy living and forgetting, a picture, a picture of what the puzzle is supposed to look like has appeared on the cover.
You slide to the floor, clutching the box to you, suddenly sobbing. The shock that the picture, the solution on the box, was the same as what had been rattling around the back of your head, whispering in the hole of your heart, nearly swallows you whole. You’d known the answer, you’d always known it, only you hadn’t been able to put the pieces in order because there had been some missing. You’d thought someone had been playing you for a fool, keeping the pieces tight in their fist, but it turns out they’d never had them either. No, those missing pieces, they’d been scattered amongst all the living and forgetting you’d been doing for the fifty days the box had been gathering dust. Of course, the picture would only appear after you’d completed this little scavenger hunt, accidental and unbeknownst.
And now, now you know the answer. You know the complete picture and now that you know that, you’ve lost any interest in putting the puzzle together. The riddle had never been inside the box. How funny. The wonders of the universe, they never cease.
Chuckling to yourself, tipping your hat to the powers that be, you pick yourself up, slide the box back onto the shelf, grinning like a fool. In the end, you’d done it. You’d solved it – not the way you thought you would, but what did that matter? You had done it. You. There was certainly something to be proud of here.
Shaking your head, you spin on your heel and glide to the kitchen. All through dinner, you smile. You go to bed, you smile. You sleep, you smile. You wake up, you smile.
The next morning, when you turn the corner from the stairs and see the box has disappeared from its shelf?
You smile then too.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
