A part where conflicts are settled without recourse to regulations or restricted by etiquette. I doubt it was one of the rare moments of full-out battle where people fill their lungs and bare their teeth to the gums and wish they lived in a different part of the animal kingdom, a part without cops or courts or child services. I can’t remember what the adults were talking about, whether their tone was cautiously hushed in that strained, stabbing whisper, or if an exchange of insults was dinner-table-volume but barbed. I found out when I presented it that Harper was an inspiration and mentor from his art school days. The next time he came over, he found that I’d finished it without him and he was genuinely hurt, despite my suggestive apologies for not being able to keep my hands off it.īefore my first visit to my partner’s flat, airborne with infatuation, I agonised over the selection of beautiful puzzles in the Stoke Newington Bookshop and settled on a Charly Harper image. I bought a tiny hundred-piecer when a new fuck-buddy came to my place for the first time, as neither of us takes alcohol and we needed something to serve as a preamble to sex. I like to buy a brand new puzzle with an image I find beautiful and personal when I’m giving one as a gift. There are exceptions to all of my rules about puzzles, of course. Sure, it’s not a good idea to trust blindly all the time, but people who love puzzles deserve the benefit of the doubt. This gesture from a stranger answers every question I might ever entertain about humanity’s essential nature. When I dumped the pieces out to seek out the edges, a little slip of paper came too, cut to the exact shape of the missing piece. People ask if I worry that there will be pieces missing, but this has only happened to me once and, to be honest, it yielded my life’s most surprisingly tender moment. I almost always buy my jigsaw puzzles second hand. When the puzzle is complete, I’m ready to return it to the charity shop and move on. This is not an event, not even a milestone. I do not glue them and frame them to keep them forever.
Then I leave it for a couple of days, no more than that, break the pieces carefully into the box. I will be able to smooth the surface with my palm, feeling the joins across a kitsch picture I like well enough but that I’m not attached to. It will take time, so I can dip in and out of it, lose myself in it for five minutes or several hours. I believe that a jigsaw puzzle’s healing powers are at their height when they adhere to what James Clear calls the Goldilocks Rule:įor a solo puzzle venture, one thousand pieces is my sweet spot. I don’t want mine to be forty thousand pieces or monochromatic or an image of a million buttons.
I make choices and some of these will be mistakes, but either in the first instance of introducing one tab (the part that sticks out) to one blank (the empty space into which the tab fits), or later on when I realise that something isn’t working, the mistakes make themselves known. I will yell at the pieces and protest that they have to fit!, but if the answer is ‘no’, I will eventually have to accept the no and move on. And the desire to negotiate with the puzzle will creep in. This problem that has a single, achievable solution requires thousands of smaller solutions in order to reach it, and a fully interlocking puzzle means that every encounter between two pieces is a binary, yes-or-no question with no conflict of morality or preference.
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