“we slot in the pieces
where they fit, instead of where they belonged…”
There was always another project to be hung on the living
room wall upon completion. It would serve as a reminder of the many hours spent
in deep concentration, searching for the perfect piece to slot into its place
on the glass tabletop.
You loved those puzzles, and I would always tease you about
it. “Child’s play,” I laughed, while I sat beside you and watched you work. But
every time you asked me to join you, I said yes. I wanted to know why you loved
it so much—enough to spend entire evenings immersed in it; I wanted to
understand how you could find your way through seven hundred tiny pieces and
fix them into something wonderful. Maybe I just wanted to understand why you
loved at all.
You always seemed to be searching for something bigger than
a puzzle piece. Sometimes I wondered if we were even looking at the same
picture—where I only saw a cacophony of colours and shapes that never quite fit
together under my fingertips, you saw a project to be completed; something that
would be beautiful if only you could put it together as it was intended. You
thought you could fix anything, and sometimes I thought you could, too—if not with
perfectly placed fingertips or a well-timed sarcastic comment, then with a grin
that danced all the way up to those hazel eyes.
You thought you could always find perfection—and once upon a
time, I thought that you were right. I glimpsed it in the moments when my hands
found yours, the first time you said my name that night after I said yes, the
moment when I realized that my life was different—better—with you in it. All the imperfect pieces that blurred into a
perfect picture—everything we wanted, or so I thought. Somehow, you, with your
perfect vision, could find the parts where the pieces didn’t quite line up—every
little crack.
Did you always know that the misplaced fragments would catch
up to us? We kept building and building, slotting in the pieces where they fit
instead of where they belonged, the picture eventually becoming so distorted
that even you could no longer find the beauty in it—you, who found beauty
everywhere that you looked. And then there was me, left to wonder if we were
ever even whole in the first place.
After the heated words exchanged that night, after the glass
frame had shattered into a million pieces that neither of us could fix, did you
know? Did you take a second look after I took my coat out of your closet for
the last time? I took the corner piece from the unfinished project on your
coffee table and slipped it into my left chest pocket, to be held ransom in the
very way that you held my heart.
I would call it a fair trade.
