Ransomed

“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.