tetris
“Everything happens for a reason,” said the Big Cheese.
Another late night in graduate school and we were of course just starting our Flash design projects at Droo’s really uncomfortable dining room table. Outside it snowed and snowed and snowed and inside I felt as crummy as the Pittsburgh winter that would never end. Sometime around 3 a.m. Droo completed his project while I still stared listlessly at my screen. He turned his laptop around to show me “A Rainy Day for Jess,” a miniature movie starring Shel Silverstein’s Missing Piece and the big pie that went around looking for it. “Will Jess ever find her missing piece?” the film questioned. Clicking yes brought the pieces together along with glowing translucent hearts (I was nerdily impressed by the opacity reduction) while clicking no left the missing piece wallowing in its own misery. Simultaneously sad and cute, it reminded me that Droo was now finished with his project and I was not only still single, but still not done with my homework. Life kicks you in the pants like that. I took his project home with me on my laptop and played it over and over again until I finally got ahold of myself and figured out how to tween.
Maybe life is just a bunch of pieces that gradually fall into place over the course of time. Perhaps no amount of coercion is going to make them fall any differently. It’s like the easy level on Tetris, where the pieces are falling so slowly that you invariably press the down button, speeding them into place until you finally screw up in your haste and misalign a few. Like before, those usually come back to kick you in the pants because they leave some kind of annoying hole that you can’t seem to get rid of for the next twenty-two pieces. If you’re really in a rush you’ll just keep making mistakes until you’re five lines from the top of the screen, sweating profusely with your eyes drying out because you can’t afford to blink. Of course you’ll think, man, why wasn’t I just a little less hasty and a little more careful at the bottom, but everything seems like a good idea in retrospect.
I’ve been erasing some of my lines recently, a big mess down at the bottom that I thought I’d never get rid of. Either the pieces I needed would never seem to materialize or I’d just try to slam the pieces I did get into place as fast as possible. Other people’s pieces are falling into place around me too. Maybe they were before but I just couldn’t see it because I was too busy fixating on my own ever growing problems near the top. Now that I’ve made the holy disaster a bit more manageable, I’ve had more time to look around me and see that it’s smoothing out not just for me, but for her and him and all those people I think about everyday but usually see less often than I would like.
In the coming year, it’s time for me to think more about the pieces and less about the lines.
