The last piece

I love games. I play all kinds of games. Quest-games, board games, card games but more than games I love puzzles, they calm me down, they train my patience and they make me incredibly happy. Mainly because I can see the results in basically no time (not counting the 5 days between the unwrapping the plastic from the box and putting the last piece into it’s place…).

A on the other hand claims to be an excellent puzzle-player when in fact he’s not. He tries to fit the pieces into places where they would NEVER fit. A did that most of his life. Trying to make pieces fit because he wanted to believe in it, he needed that to keep going and he still does. It’s not the challenge he loves, it’s not the trying out of all the misleading paths, what he loves is when he finds two pieces, that actually do fit together.

There were endless nights, where I was done with my side of the puzzle already and A couldn’t even get an 1/8 done, after enough trying and a lot of frustration, he would finally get from the sofa, would mumble something like, “stupid puzzle”, would get a bucket of ice cream, sit down on the sofa again and enjoy his treat.

Right now we’re at the blue stage of our puzzle. It’s the part where you’re trying to finish the sky but there are just so many blue pieces and they all look alike, how would you ever find the pieces that would fit together? I keep looking for the little white pieces that indicate clouds and try to put them together, while A stares at 5 different shades of blue and wonders which would fit where. Needless to say that this calls for a lot of ice cream, a lot of patience and – if it were entirely up to him – an endless journey. But see, that’s the fun part about playing games together and doing puzzles together. You in fact, do them together and get to enjoy the outcome together.

A couple years ago, when we first started going out, I saw this awesome tigger puzzle, that was actually a photomosaics and yes, this is puzzle 2.0 – a bit more challenging, a bit more frustrating but the outcome is also a bit more wonderful. I had the puzzle done in about 6 days. Every evening when A came home from work, he’d sit down with me and he would reluctantly offer to help, although he knew that it would end up just the way it ended up the night before. But if it weren’t for his endless devotion for puzzles, we wouldn’t be doing this. We wouldn’t be puzzling together, we wouldn’t share our lives together.

I love A a lot, he is my source of happiness and he is my most favorite person on this world. He is the reason why doing a puzzle is not only fun but it is even more fun because we get to do it together. He is the reason why we are currently working on our puzzle together. His patience and motivation is why we are still going and although we are both worn out, looking at the box and wondering if we would ever get our puzzle to look like the picture on the box, we are still trying to finish our puzzle hoping to be together soon and hoping for putting the last piece into it’s place.