The First Puzzle

I always think of you anytime I pass by a puzzle, which happens far more often than one would expect once you start paying attention, because puzzles live low to the ground, tucked into thrift store shelves and grocery aisles, hidden near the floor like offerings meant for those willing to bend, and I never mean the metaphorical kind, never the philosophical or rhetorical puzzles people like to admire for their cleverness, but the actual, physical, cut-cardboard kind, the kind that belongs to hands and tables and time.

The kind that smells faintly of dust and ink and someone else’s house.

The kind that spent years being ignored in the shadows of a closet, learning patience the way women do, quietly, without anyone naming it, hoping all the while that nothing essential slipped away during the long stretch of being set aside.

There is a particular hope stitched into those boxes, the hope that all the pieces are still there, that the picture still knows itself, that neglect did not undo the work it was always meant to become.

This is where it begins for us.

With puzzles.

With games pulled out after dinner.

With wine glasses sweating onto kitchen tables scarred by homework and grocery lists and everything else that needed doing before pleasure was allowed back in the room.

We spread the pieces out like a small ritual, no ceremony announced, no rules written down, just women gathering around a table that has already held so much, sleeves rolled, bodies easing out of the day, letting their hands remember something older than obligation.

Someone always asks what happens if a piece is missing, half-joking, half-afraid, and someone else always answers that we will live with it, because we have already learned that wholeness is negotiable, that beauty does not collapse just because something is absent.

We begin with the edges, because that’s how we were taught, because borders feel safer, because it helps to know where a thing ends before you let yourself wander inside it, but it never lasts long before someone drifts inward, distracted by color, by water, by the curve of a road going somewhere unnamed, and suddenly the puzzle stops behaving like a task and starts acting like a place.

The images are always of destinations none of us have been to yet, villages and coastlines curated for dreaming, the kind of places that live safely in magazines and someday plans, but as the pieces begin to lock together, the room shifts just enough to notice, as if geography itself is listening, as if maps remember the hands that trace them.

The table grows warmer.

The wine tastes better the longer we stay.

Laughter deepens, grows heavier, like it is carrying something more than humor.

This is not escape.

This is assembly.

This is women choosing to stay at the table after the clearing is done, choosing pleasure that does not ask permission, choosing play without apology, choosing to make something beautiful with their hands in the same rooms where they have learned to endure.

We linger over pieces that should be easy, slow ourselves on purpose, because finishing carries its own quiet grief, because some things only exist fully while they are becoming, and once completed must either be preserved or broken apart again.

When the last piece finally clicks into place, the room exhales.

We sit back and look at what we’ve made, a place that feels, absurdly, like it knows us now, like it would recognize us if we ever arrived, like it has been waiting patiently for our hands all along.

Later, we will return the pieces to the box carefully, folding the image inward so it can sleep, so it can survive another stretch of darkness without forgetting itself.

But for now, the puzzle rests whole on the table, humming quietly, and something ancient settles into the room with us, something passed down without words, something our mothers and grandmothers practiced without naming, this knowing that joy can be built slowly, that beauty does not require permission, that the sacred is not always found in temples or journeys or far-off places, but sometimes right here, at the kitchen table, with cardboard and wine and women who remember how to stay.